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Koch Industries logo. [Source: Koch Industries / Wikipedia]Oil magnate Fred Koch co-founds Wood River Oil and Refining Company, later renamed Koch Industries. The firm will grow to become one of the largest energy conglomerates in the US, and Koch will become an influential backer of right-wing politics. Koch is a virulent anti-Communist who will be one of the first members of the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), a far-right organization that reflects his hatred of Communism (he believes both the Republican and Democratic parties are irretrievably infilitrated by Communists) and opposes almost every aspect of governance in general. Koch will write glowingly of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s murderous suppression of Communists during World War II. Both Koch and the JBS have little use for minorities; of African-Americans, Koch will write, “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” and he will say that government welfare programs were designed to attract large numbers of blacks to the cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In 1963, using language that reporter Jane Mayer will later say “prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot,” Koch will warn that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the US until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” Koch’s two sons, David and Charles, will have their father’s political views deeply ingrained into them (see August 30, 2010). In 2007, David Koch will tell a reporter: “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government.… It’s something I grew up with—a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.” Gus diZerega, once a close friend of Charles’s, will later say that the brothers transfer their father’s hatred of Communism to the US government, which they will come to view as a tyranny. DiZerega will write that the Kochs, like many other hard-right conservatives, redefine “socialism” as almost any form of government which taxes citizens and regulates businesses. [New Yorker, 8/30/2010]

Portion of a 1955 cartoon warning against the evils of three government health programs, including water fluoridation. [Source: Spectator]As World War II is coming to a close, the US Public Health Service (USPHS) begins a pilot program in Michigan to add fluoride to selected cities’ water supply, as a tooth-decay preventative. By 1950, 87 American towns and cities volunteer to have the agency fluoridate their water supply. By the early 1950s, water fluoridation is compulsory. Studies show that children between the ages of 5 and 9 show significantly smaller rates of cavities and tooth decay when they regularly drink fluoridated water, though studies of older children and adults are less clear. As the federal government begins rolling out its mandatory fluoridation program, far-right organizations such as the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) begin taking rigid stances against it. The JBS, a staunchly anti-Communist organization, accuses the federal government of imposing “creeping socialism” and “Soviet Communism” on the nation by making fluoridated water mandatory, and warns Americans against the government “polluting our precious bodily fluids.” (In 1993, JBS member Murray N. Rothbard differentiates between the brands of communism at work, saying, “[N]o, not Bolsheviks, guys: but a Menshevik-State Capitalist alliance.”) The JBS, in accusations later echoed by Rothbard, accuses the government of working with aluminum manufacturer Alcoa to dump sodium fluoride, a byproduct of aluminum manufacturing, into the nation’s water supply and rid Alcoa of the cost of disposing of the substance. The 1964 satirical film Dr. Strangelove features a character, General Jack D. Ripper, shouting, “Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?” [New American, 1/1993; Reason, 12/5/2001; Hileman, 5/2008] In 1988, the Fluoride Action Network notes that the two opposing camps—fluoridation is beneficial and has no side effects vs. fluoridation is useless and harmful—have fought to an argumentative standstill, with no middle ground between the two. Jacqueline Warren, an attorney with the National Resources Defense Council, says, “Neither side has given the other one rational moment.” [Hileman, 5/2008] In the early 1990s, environmentalist and public health safety groups begin calling for new examinations of the impact of fluoride on the human body, pointing to “valid concerns” about fluoride having a toxic impact on the human body and on the environment. In 2008, one JBS member warns, perhaps sardonically, “Don’t be surprised if we learn soon that the fluoride in Chinese toothpaste is nuclear waste from North Korea.” [Reason, 12/5/2001; Mother Jones, 5/2008]

A Time magazine profile lambasts the racist, anti-Communist John Birch Society (JBS—see December 2011), in what is many Americans’ first exposure to the group. It delineates the organization’s penchant for secrecy, its domination by its “dictatorial” leader, Robert Welch, and its hardline battle against almost every element of the federal government as “agents of Communism.” Forty to 60 percent of the federal government is controlled by Communism, the JBS believes. Time calls the organization “a tiresome, comic-opera joke” that nonetheless has cells in 35 states and an ever-widening influence. In Wichita, Kansas, JBS student members are trained to inform their cell leaders of “Communist” influences they may detect in their classroom lectures, and the offending teacher is berated by parents. A Wichita businessman who wanted to give a donation to the University of Wichita decided not to donate after being hounded by local JBS members, who wanted the university to fire professors and remove selected books from its library. “My business would be wrecked,” the businessman explains, “if those people got on the phone and kept on yelling that I am a Communist because I give money to the school.” Nashville, Tennessee, JBS members organize community members to verbally attack neighbors whom they suspect of Communist affiliations. JBS’s current priority, Time writes, is to bring about the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Welch, who obtained his wealth from his brother’s candymaking business, believes that Social Security and the federal income tax are all part of the “creeping socialism” that is taking over the federal government. He retired from the business in 1957 and founded the JBS shortly thereafter, naming it for a US Navy captain killed by Chinese Communist guerrillas after the end of World War II. Welch’s seminal tract, “The Politician,” accuses President Eisenhower and his brother Milton Eisenhower of being Communist plants, and accuses both men of treason against the nation. [Time, 3/10/1961]

W. Cleon Skousen. [Source: Skousen2000 (.com)]Author W. Cleon Skousen, a supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS—see December 2011), writes an article attacking the Time profile of the JBS (see March 10, 1961) as being part of an orchestrated Communist attack on the organization. The article came about after the international Communist Party “ordered” the “annihilation” of the JBS, Skousen says. Skousen denies the group’s penchant for secrecy, saying that it was openly set up in 1958 as a network of “study groups” examining the threat of Communism to American society. The organization, he writes, is nothing more than “a study group program with a strong bias in favor of traditional American constitutionalism.” By 1960, the JBS earned the enmity of competing conservative groups, Skousen says, because the organization “had rallied together most of the best informed and hardest working patriots in many cities.” However, he writes, JBS members tend to be part of other conservative movements as well. The JBS worked to defeat a bill, slated to be introduced in January 1961, that would largely defund the House Committee on Un-American Activities “so it could not investigate the Communist Party.” Skousen says that JBS efforts derailed the bill, handing the American Communist Party “an overwhelming defeat.” After the bill was defeated, Skousen says, “a manifesto… from Moscow” ordered the destruction of the JBS, as it posed the primary danger to “Communist progress” in the US. The Time magazine profile of the JBS was part of that effort, Skousen says, after the organization was attacked in the pages of the Daily People’s World, a West Coast publication that Skousen says was “the official Communist newspaper” of that area. Within days, the information in the article was reprinted in Time’s own article, which reached far more people than the People’s World. “[T]he thing which astonished me,” Skousen writes, “was the rapidity with which the transmission belt began to function so that this story was planted in one major news medium after another until finally even some of the more conservative papers had taken up the hue and cry.” Skousen calls the article a Communist plant filled with fabrications and lies. He says that JBS leader Robert Welch’s accusations that President Eisenhower and other pro-American world leaders are Communists were made in “private communication[s] to his friends” and were never part of official JBS principles, and took place well before Welch founded the JBS in 1957; therefore, Skousen writes, to report Welch’s characterizations is to smear the JBS. Skousen also denies any racism or anti-Semitism on the JBS’s part, and uses a sympathetic 1963 report by the California Senate Factfinding Committee to “prove” his claims. The report concluded that Welch and the JBS have “stirred the slumbering spirit of patriotism in thousands of Americans, roused them from lethargy, and changed their apathy into a deep desire to first learn the facts about communism and then implement that knowledge with effective and responsible action.” Skousen concludes that while Americans are free to disagree with JBS principles and actions, any criticism of the organization should be considered potential Communist propaganda designed to smear the organization and reduce its effectiveness. If the criticism does not come from Communists themselves, it plays into Communist hands. As he claims to have been told by “[a] former member of the Communist Party National Committee,” “The Communist leaders look upon the stamping out of the John Birch Society as a matter of life and death for the Party.” [Our Republic, 1963]

Part of a poster distributed by the John Birch Society in Dallas in the days before President Kennedy’s motorcade travels through that city. Kennedy will be assassinated while in the motorcade. [Source: Spartacus Schoolnet (.com)]The John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), an anti-Communist organization that embraces racist and white supremacist ideologies, distrubutes posters throughout Dallas accusing President Kennedy of committing treason against the United States. The poster distribution is timed to coincide with Kennedy’s visit to Dallas, where he is scheduled to drive through the city in a motorcade on November 22. Kennedy will be assassinated during that motorcade. The poster, designed to appear as a “Wanted” notice, enumerates the following “charges” against Kennedy: “Betraying the Constitution (which he swore to uphold). He is turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations. He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).” “He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the US (United Nations, Berlin Wall, Missile Removal, Cuba, Wheat deals, Test Ban Treaty, etc.).” “He has been lax in enforcing the Communist Registration laws.” “He has given support and encouragement to the Communist-inspired racial riots.” “He has illegally invaded a sovereign State with federal troops.” “He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office. Upholds the Supreme Court in Anti-Christian rulings. Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.” “He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).” [Spartacus Schoolnet, 2008]

William Pierce. [Source: Qbitblog (.com)]William Pierce, a white supremacist and a senior research scientist at Pratt and Whitney Advanced Materials Research and Development Laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut, quits the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP), the remnants of the American Nazi Party (ANP), which had begun to collapse after the August 1967 assassination of its leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, Pierce’s mentor. Pierce leaves the organization after a violent argument with its leadership and joins the National Youth Alliance (NYA). This group formed from what was Youth for Wallace, a 1968 organization founded by Willis Carto to garner support on college campuses for segregationist George Wallace (D-AL)‘s third-party presidential campaign (see 1964 and May 15, 1972). After the 1968 election, the group renamed itself and continued its work on university campuses. In 1974, after a bitter power struggle between Carto and Pierce, the organization splinters. Pierce calls his burgeoning organization the National Alliance, incorporating it in February 1974. In 2002, Carto will tell a reporter: “I started the Youth for Wallace. After the election, the Youth for Wallace head Louis Byers, he took the mailing list and went to Pierce and made a deal. That’s where the National Youth Alliance came from, then Pierce changed the name.” Carto will form the Liberty Lobby, which will publish a prominent white supremacist tabloid, The Spotlight, and will found the Institute for Historical Review, which will specialize in “proving” the Holocaust never happened. Pierce and Carto will remain bitter rivals. Pierce will write The Turner Diaries, an inflammatory “future history” of a white revolution in America that leads to the overthrow of the government and the extermination of minorities (see 1978), which Pierce will serialize in the Alliance’s newsletter, “Attack!” (later renamed “National Vanguard”). [Center for New Community, 8/2002 ] Pierce is joined in creating the National Alliance by former John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) co-founder Revilo P. Oliver. Pierce and Oliver will soon name Adolf Hitler “the greatest man of our era.” [NewsOne, 2/24/2010]

Ben Klassen. [Source: Creativity Movement (.com)]Former Florida state legislator Benhardt “Ben” Klassen, who served as Florida chair of the 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace (D-AL), forms the Church of the Creator (COTC) in Lighthouse Point, Florida. Klassen was born in the Ukraine in 1918, and later lived in Mexico and Canada before moving to California as an adult. He is a former elementary school teacher and an inventor, earning a patent for an electric can opener in 1954. He moved to Florida in 1958, where he became a successful real estate agent. He became a Republican representative to the Florida House of Representatives in 1965, where he campaigned against desegregation and the federal government. He is a lifetime member of the far-right John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), though he has denounced the group as a “smokescreen for the Jews” and accused Wallace of “betraying” his supporters by intentionally courting African-American support. Klassen explains his race-based religion in his church’s 511-page holy book, Nature’s Eternal Religion. Among its “16 commandments”: “It is our sacred goal to populate the lands of this earth with White people exclusively.” Klassen popularizes the war cry “Rahowa,” which stands for RAcial HOly WAr. [Anti-Defamation League, 1993; Southern Poverty Law Center, 9/1999] Members of the COTC, according to Klassen’s writings, see “every issue, whether religious, political, or racial, [a]s viewed through the eyes of the White Man and exclusively from the point of view of the White race as a whole.… We completely reject the Judeo-democratic-Marxist values of today and supplant them with new and basic values, of which race is the foundation.” While most right-wing extremist groups use Christianity to justify their racism, Klassen and the COTC attack Christianity as a “tremendous weapon in the worldwide Jewish drive of race-mixing.” Klassen writes that Jews “concocted” Christianity “for the very purpose of mongrelizing and destroying the White Race.” According to Klassen, Jews are “parasites” who “control and manipulate the finances, the propaganda, the media, and the governments of the world.” [Anti-Defamation League, 7/6/1999] In 2004, author Chip Berlet will write that Klassen’s religion, “Creativity,” claims that whites are destined “to rule the world and thus fulfill the purpose of the universe. To attain this destiny, it is necessary to destroy the enemies and race traitors who prevent this from happening. The primary enemies are Jews, blacks, and other ‘mud people,’ and white race traitors, including most Christians. Klassen credits the influence of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the development of his views.… What Klassen did was to pick up ideas from the theories of [German philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche, pantheisim, Odinism, and Celtic paganism as filtered through German Nazi retelling of the Norse heroic warrior myths, to create a religion of Aryanist white supremacy. Discarding the details, he created a form of cosmotheism in which the supreme power is the collective will of the Aryan race. The duty of every member of the Aryan race is to reflect the ideals of the heroic warrior and do battle with the enemies of the race.… Like other forms of fascism, the idea of action is central to the philosophy, as is the celebration of violence and the spilling of blood as part of a rite of passage to full adulthood.” [Chip Berlet, 2004]

Following the revelations of the Church Committee’s investigation into the excesses of the CIA (see April, 1976), and the equally revealing New York Times article documenting the CIA’s history of domestic surveillance against US citizens for political purposes (see December 21, 1974), Congress passes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In essence, FISA prohibits physical and electronic surveillance against US citizens except in certain circumstances affecting national security, under certain guidelines and restrictions, with court warrants issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), operating within the Department of Justice as well as with criminal warrants. FISA restricts any surveillance of US citizens (including US corporations and permanent foreign residents) to those suspected of having contact with “foreign powers” and terrorist organizations. FISA gives a certain amount of leeway for such surveillance operations, requiring that the administration submit its evidence for warrantless surveillance to FISC within 24 hours of its onset and keeping the procedures and decisions of FISC secret from the public. [Electronic Frontier Foundation, 9/27/2001; Legal Information Institute, 11/30/2004] On September 14, 2001, Congress will pass a revision of FISA that extends the time period for warrantless surveillance to 72 hours. The revision, part of the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2002, will also lower the standard for the issuance of wiretap warrants and make legal “John Doe,” or generic, warrants that can be used without naming a particular target. FISA revisions will also expand the bounds of the technologies available to the government for electronic and physical surveillance, and broaden the definitions of who can legally be monitored. [US Senate, 9/14/2001; Senator Jane Harman, 2/1/2006]

A Web graphic opposing the ‘New World Order.’ [Source: Human Symbiose (.org)]In a speech discussing the post-Cold War world, President Bush outlines his vision of a “New World Order.” Bush says: “We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.” The Southern Poverty Law Center will later write that many people, particularly white supremacists and separatists, take Bush’s phrase “as a slip of the tongue revealing secret plans to create a one-world government.” [Sweet Liberty, 9/11/1990; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001] In 1995, Michigan gun dealer and right-wing activist Frank Kieltyka will describe the “New World Order” to a Buffalo News reporter. According to Kieltyka, the “New World Order” is backed by the US government and led by, among other organizations, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “We’re moving towards the Communists,” Kieltyka will warn. The belief in this “New World Order” will be emphasized in coming years in the militia movements and by right-wing publications such as The Spotlight, an openly racist, anti-government newsletter. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 157-158]

Author Brandon M. Stickney, a reporter for the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal in upstate New York, catalogs a number of unproven and sometimes extremist conspiracy theories that have sprouted in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Stickney includes his findings in his “unauthorized biography” of accused bomber Timothy McVeigh (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995, July 11-13, 1995, and August 10, 1995), All-American Monster. Among the theories Stickney presents: The bombing was carried out by the Japanese. This theory was promulgated by Michigan Militia leaders Norm Olson and Ray Southwell (see April 1994), and proved so embarrassing for the two that they resigned their posts. Both the Oklahoma City bombing and the Branch Davidian tragedy (see April 19, 1993 and April 19, 1993 and After) were engineered by Clinton administration personnel in order to kill two former bodyguards of President Clinton who were preparing to go public with lurid tales of Clinton’s sexual transgressions. Secret Service agent Alan Wicher was killed in Oklahoma, and BATF agent Robert William was killed at Waco. Clinton attended Wicher’s funeral, and William had worked for the BATF in Little Rock while Clinton was governor of Arkansas. Idaho resident Bill Trowbridge told an Associated Press reporter after a militia meeting: “[T]hat makes four different bodyguards killed. Three in Waco, and this one. Sure did benefit Bill Clinton, didn’t it? Check that out.” The UN participated in the bombing plot. This theory has been promoted by the John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), the editors of the white-separatist magazine The Spotlight, and other organizations and groups that have warned about a partnership between the UN and the US government to impose tyranny and martial law on American citizens, as part of the imposition of what they call the “New World Order” (see September 11, 1990). Gate Keepers information service representative Pam Beesley told an AP reporter that “this is what the UN does when they go in and overthrow a country. They produce unrest in the country first.” The bomb was an “electrodynamic gaseous fuel device” impossible for amateurs like McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols to have made. Instead, it must have been made by US officials possessed of “high-level, top-secret” information. This theory came from former FBI agent Ted Gunderson, who makes regular appearances in The Spotlight. According to Gunderson, “John Doe No. 2” (see April 20, 1995, April 21, 1995, April 29, 1995, and June 14, 1995) was “vaporized by design” in the blast, and McVeigh was a “throwaway” or an “expendable asset.” Two bombs, not one, destroyed the Murrah Federal Building. It is true that two “incidents” were recorded at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, 11.9 seconds apart, but, according to Oklahoma chief geophysicist James Lawson, the second tremor was not caused by a second bomb, but by the building collapsing (see After 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Lawson told the AP he still gets calls from people demanding to know about the “second explosion.” “A lot of them are anxious to explain to me that our government committed mass murder,” he said. “They are disappointed that I’m not saying it was two blasts.” Stickney writes that many people have told him flatly that “they know” the government caused the bombing, and writes: “No matter what I told them, or for how long I tried to tell it, they would not change their minds that the government was involved. Distrust in public officials has reached the point of delusion, where Americans create their own explanations they cannot understand. One of the people who spoke with me went so far as to say he’d obtained a photograph of the bombed-out Murrah (ordered through a late-night AM radio show) that ‘proves two bombs were set off. McVeigh was led to Oklahoma by his nose, by the government.’” A video titled Oklahoma City: What Really Happened sells well at gun shows and through militia magazines and Web sites. On the box, it poses the questions: “Was there more than one bomb?” “What happened to John Doe No. 2?” “Was there a Middle Eastern connection?” and “Did some occupants of the building have prior warning?” [Stickney, 1996, pp. 265-267]

Around 10,000 people attend the “Center for Preparedness Expo” in Denver to prepare for the imminent “Y2K” collapse of society warned of by many white separatists and “Patriot” movement members (see October 20, 1999 and February 4, 1999). The expo has traveled the country, including a stop in Philadelphia in June. Promoter Dan Chittock says the show offers “practical information for the uncertain times we live in,” but Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center says the expo features what he calls “a queer mix of people interested in organic farming and political extremism.” Visitors can buy anything from radiation detectors, tents, and survival rations to guides on avoiding income taxes and making their own license plates to avoid paying licensing fees for their vehicles. Lectures are offered with such titles as “Trapping Techniques for Self-Reliance and Survival,” “Don’t Get Caught With Your Pantry Down,” and “Save Your Life, Be Your Own Doctor.” Three seminars are about life under martial law. Previous expos have featured speakers such as militia leader Bo Gritz, who has spoken about coming plagues, imminent food shortages, and how President Clinton has sold out America. Stephen O’Leary, a University of Southern California professor who studies beliefs about the millennium, says that the expos have become recruitment centers for anti-government, survivalist militia groups who often hold racist and anti-Semitic views. “It’s not just about preparing for an emergency or disaster,” he says. “What they’re selling is a whole world view—a program for the apocalypse.” Potok, who has attended previous expos, says “it’s not unusual to see booths for the John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) and the Montana Militia next to a granola salesman.” The radical right, Potok says, is using fears of the upcoming millennium—“Y2K”—to fuel hysteria about what they say is the imminent declaration of martial law by the federal government and the eradication of constitutional liberties. Chittock calls such concerns “nonsense.” Barry Morrison of the Anti-Defamation League says of the expos: “What we’re concerned about is that some people take the position that the government is not to be trusted. Some of these exhibitors… portray people like Jews in an unfavorable light and as having undue control over their lives.” Morrison says anti-Semitic tracts espousing “Christian Identity” ideology (see 1960s and After) have appeared at previous expos. He also says Gritz’s Liberty Lobby is “the most influential anti-Semitic propaganda organization in America today.” He adds: “I’m not saying everyone [at the expos] is an extremist or subscribes to those views, but this is a vehicle that attracts that element. It’s part of the mix.” [Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/11/1999; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001]

Representative Ron Paul, profiled in a New York Times article, answers a question about his connections to the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961, 1978-1996, August 4, 2008 and December 2011). “Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society!” Paul replies in what the reporter calls “mock horror.” “Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated and they understand the Constitution. I don’t know how many positions they would have that I don’t agree with. Because they’re real strict constitutionalists, they don’t like the war, they’re hard-money people.” [New York Times, 7/22/2007] The JBS is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent right-wing extremist group that has accused a number of lawmakers, including former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, of being “closet Communists,” and promotes “wild conspiracy theories” such as the “international Jewish” conspiracy to control the global economy and the idea that the World War II Holocaust never happened. The JBS has been a pioneer in what an analysis by Political Research Associates (PRA) will call “the encoding of implicit cultural forms of ethnocentric white racism and Christian nationalist antisemitism rather than relying on the white supremacist biological determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right prior to WWII.” PRA will note, “Throughout its existence, however, the Society has promoted open homophobia and sexism.” [Political Research Associates, 2010; Southern Poverty Law Center, 8/17/2010]

The Protect America Act (PAA) (see August 5, 2007), an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA—see 1978), is introduced in Congress. With limited debate and no committee hearings, it passes both houses with substantial majorities. [US Senate, 8/5/2007; Boston Globe, 8/6/2007; House Judiciary Committee, 9/18/2007 ] Congressional Democrats quickly capitulate on the bill, submitting to what the Washington Post later calls “a high-pressure campaign by the White House to change the nation’s wiretap law, in which the administration capitalized on Democrats’ fears of being branded weak on terrorism and on Congress’s desire to act on the issue before its August recess.” [Washington Post, 8/5/2007] Indeed, one Republican senator, Trent Lott, warns during the initial debate that lawmakers should pass the law quickly and get out of Washington before they could be killed in a terrorist attack (see August 2, 2007). McConnell tells the Senate, “Al-Qaeda is not going on vacation this month.” And Democrat Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), a supporter of the bill, told his colleagues: “We’re at war. The enemy wants to attack us. This is not the time to strive for legislative perfection.” [Slate, 8/6/2007]Some Democrats Unhappy - One Democratic lawmaker responds angrily: “There are a lot of people who felt we had to pass something. It was tantamount to being railroaded.” Many House Democrats feel betrayed by the White House; Democratic leaders had reached what they believed was a deal on the bill with the Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, only to have the White House throw out the deal and present a new list of conditions at the last minute. Both McConnell and the White House deny that any such deal was reached. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, says, “I think the White House didn’t want to take ‘yes’ for an answer from the Democrats.” Representative Jerrold Nadler (R-NY) says lawmakers were “stampeded by fear-mongering and deception” into voting for the bill. Fellow House Democrat Jane Harman (D-CA) warns that the PAA will lead to “potential unprecedented abuse of innocent Americans’ privacy.” [Washington Post, 8/5/2007] The ACLU’s Caroline Fredrickson has a succinct explanation of why the Democrats folded so quickly: “Whenever the president says the word terrorism, they roll over and play dead.” [Slate, 8/6/2007]AT&T Whistleblower: Democratic Leadership Colluded in Passing PAA - AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and December 15-31, 2005) will later write that the Democrats played a far more active role in getting the PAA passed than others acknowledge. He will quote a 2008 column by liberal civil liberties advocate Glenn Greenwald, who will write: “[I]n 2006, when the Congress was controlled by [then-Senate Majority Leader] Bill Frist [R-TN] and [then-House Speaker] Denny Hastert [R-IL], the administration tried to get a bill passed legalizing warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, but was unable. They had to wait until the Congress was controlled by [House Majority Leader] Steny Hoyer [D-MD], [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi [D-CA], and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] to accomplish that.” According to Klein, once the Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007, they engaged in “pure theater, posturing as opponents of the illegal NSA program while seeking a way to protect the president.” The few principled Democrats to actively oppose the legislation, such as Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), were, Klein will write, “hamstrung by their own leadership.” The PAA passage was accompanied by refusals from the Democratic leaders of “the relevant Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, which were now led by Democrats such as [John D.] Rockefeller, [Dianne] Feinstein (see February 1-6, 2006), and [Patrick] Leahy in the Senate, and John Conyers and Sylvestre Reyes in the House,” who “quickly decided not to launch any serious investigations into the NSA spying.” Klein will later add that at the time of the PAA passage, he was unaware of how thoroughly Democrats had been briefed on the NSA program (see October 1, 2001, October 11, 2001, October 25, 2001 and November 14, 2001, July 17, 2003, and March 10, 2004), “and thus were in on the secret but took no action to stop it.” [Salon, 6/19/2008; Klein, 2009, pp. 86-87]

During the Senate debate over the controversial Protect America Act (see August 5, 2007), Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) says that the threat from terrorism is so dire, and so imminent, that lawmakers should pass the law and then get out of Washington as soon as they can to save their own lives. (Congress goes into recess in a few days.) Lott says that Congress needs to pass the PAA, otherwise, “the disaster could be on our doorstep.” He continues, “I think it would be good to leave town in August, and it would probably be good to stay out until September the 12th.” Lott provides no information about any predictions of an imminent terrorist attack on Washington or anywhere else. [Roll Call, 8/2/2007]

Congressional Democrats attempt to short-circuit the Protect America Act (see August 5, 2007) currently under debate. They introduce their own bill, the Improving Foreign Intelligence Surveillance to Defend the Nation and the Constitution Act, that would address the administration’s concerns that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act imposed unwieldy limitations on the NSA’s ability to electronically monitor foreign communications that were transmitted through communications networks inside the US. The Democrats’ bill redefines “electronic surveillance” to allow the NSA to monitor such communications without a FISA warrant if it “reasonably believes” the targets of those communications to be outside the US. This would give the NSA new surveillance powers, so the Democrats’ bill provides for oversight by the FISA Court, audits by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, and restrictions on domestic surveillance. However, the Bush administration does not want the bill to become law. President Bush announces that he opposes the bill, and threatens to hold Congress in session past its August adjournment date until he can get the Protect America Act passed. The Democrats’ bill dies before ever coming up for a full vote in Congress. [US House of Representatives, 8/3/2007 ; Slate, 8/6/2007]

Mitch McConnell. [Source: US Senate]President Bush signs the controversial Protect America Act (PAA) into law. The bill, which drastically modifies the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 (see 1978), was sponsored by two Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Christopher Bond (R-MO), but written by the Bush administration’s intelligence advisers. [US Senate, 8/5/2007; Washington Post, 8/5/2007] It passed both houses of Congress with little debate and no hearings (see August 1-4, 2007). “This more or less legalizes the NSA [domestic surveillance] program,” says Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies. [New York Times, 8/6/2007] Slate’s Patrick Radden Keefe adds ominously, “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is now dead, and it’s never coming back.” [Slate, 8/6/2007] The PAA expires in six months, the only real concession Congressional Democrats were able to secure. Though the Bush administration and its allies in Congress insist that the law gives the government “the essential tools it needs” to conduct necessary surveillance of foreign-based terrorists while protecting Americans’ civil liberties, many Democrats and civil liberties organizations say the bill allows the government to wiretap US residents in communication with overseas parties without judiciary or Congressional oversight. Bush calls the bill “a temporary, narrowly focused statute to deal with the most immediate shortcomings in the law” that needs to be expanded and made permanent by subsequent legislation. The administration says that the lack of judiciary oversight in the new law will be adequately covered by “internal bureaucratic controls” at the National Security Agency. [Associated Press, 8/5/2007; Washington Post, 8/5/2007]Reining in FISA - The PAA allows FISA to return “to its original focus on protecting the rights of Americans, while not acting as an obstacle to conducting foreign intelligence surveillance on foreign targets located overseas.” Before the PAA, the White House says, FISA created unnecessary obstacles in allowing US intelligence to “gain real-time information about the intent of our enemies overseas,” and “diverted scarce resources that would be better spent safeguarding the civil liberties of people in the United States, not foreign terrorists who wish to do us harm.” The PAA no longer requires the government to obtain FISA warrants to monitor “foreign intelligence targets located in foreign countries” who are contacting, or being contacted by, US citizens inside US borders. FISA will continue to review the procedures used by US intelligence officials in monitoring US citizens and foreign contacts by having the attorney general inform the FISA Court of the procedures used by the intelligence community to determine surveillance targets are outside the United States.” Allows Third Parties to Assist in Surveillance, Grants Immunity - The PAA also allows the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to secure the cooperation of “third parties,” particularly telecommunications firms and phone carriers, to “provide the information, facilities, and assistance necessary to conduct surveillance of foreign intelligence targets located overseas.” It provides these firms with immunity from any civil lawsuits engendered by such cooperation. Short Term Legislation - The White House says that Congress must pass further legislation to give telecommunications firms permanent and retroactive immunity against civil lawsuits arising from their cooperation with the government’s domestic surveillance program. [White House, 8/6/2006]Temporary Suspension of the Constitution? - Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, says: “I’m not comfortable suspending the Constitution even temporarily. The countries we detest around the world are the ones that spy on their own people. Usually they say they do it for the sake of public safety and security.” [Washington Post, 8/5/2007]

The American Civil Liberties Union registers bitter disapproval of the newly passed Protect America Act (see August 5, 2007), which it disparagingly labels the “Police America Act.” It writes: “[The act] allows for massive, untargeted collection of international communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts. It contains virtually no protections for the US end of the phone call or email, leaving decisions about the collection, mining and use of Americans’ private communications up to this administration.” The Attorney General can issue warrants for domestic surveillance of international communications without court review, and can order surveillance of people outside of the US for a year, all without any review by the FISA Court. The PAA “cut[s FISA] out of the process, leaving the executive branch unchecked.” Any telephone or e-mail communications from US citizens “caught up in the dragnet” can be examined at the government’s leisure, the ACLU says, without any privacy considerations or respect for Constitutional rights. The law leaves “the administration to decide how to collect, store, datamine and use Americans’ private communications.” The ACLU says that the court review provisions of the PAA are a sham. The Attorney General need not explain how US citizens’ communications are handled once they are intercepted. The FISA Court “will have no information about how extensive the breach of American privacy is, nor the authority to remedy it.” The provisions for Congressional oversight are equally meaningless, the ACLU says, because the Attorney General is not required to disclose any information about what domestic communications the government has intercepted or what is being done with those intercepts. [American Civil Liberties Union, 8/7/2007]

Aziz Huq. [Source: American Prospect]Aziz Huq, an author and the director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, writes that the Protect America Act (PAA-see August 5, 2007) came about as a result of what he calls “the most recent example of the national security waltz, a three-step administration maneuver for taking defeat and turning it into victory.” Step one is a court defeat for the administration, for example regarding detainees at Guantanamo (see June 28, 2004), or the overruling of military commissions in 2006 (see June 30, 2006). The second step, which comes weeks or months later, is an announcement that the ruling has created a security crisis and must be “remedied” through immediate legislation. The third and final step is the administration pushing legislation through Congress, such as the Detainee Treatment Act (see December 15, 2005) or the Military Commissions Act, that, Huq writes, “not only undoes the good court decision but also inflicts substantial damage to the infrastructure of accountability.” Step One: FISC Refuses to Approve NSA's Surveillance Program - In January 2007, the administration announced that it was submitting the NSA’s domestic surveillance program to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secret court that issues FISA warrants for surveillance (see May 1, 2007). This was due to pending court cases threatening to rule the program in violation of FISA and the Fourth Amendment; the administration wanted to forestall, or at least sidestep, those upcoming rulings. In June, FISC refused to approve parts of the NSA program that involved monitoring overseas communications that passed through US telecom switches. Since a tremendous amount of overseas communications are routed through US networks, this ruling jeopardized the NSA’s previous ability to wiretap such communications virtually at will without a warrant. The administration objected to the NSA having to secure such warrants. Step Two: The Drumbeat Begins - Months later, the drumbeat for new legislation to give the NSA untrammeled rights to monitor “overseas” communications, which not only traveled through US networks, but often began or ended with US citizens, began with appearances in the right-wing media by administration supporters, where they insisted that the FISC ruling was seriously hampering the NSA’s ability to garner much-needed intelligence on terrorist plots against the US. The White House and Congressional Republicans drafted legislation giving the NSA what it wanted, and presented it during the last week of the Congressional session, minimizing the time needed for scrutiny of the legislation as well as reducing the time available for meaningful debate. Step Three: Passing a Law With Hidden Teeth - The legislation that would become the Protect America Act was carefully written by Bush officials, and would go much farther than giving the NSA the leeway it needed to wiretap US citizens. Instead, as Huq writes, “the Protect America Act is a dramatic, across-the-board expansion of government authority to collect information without judicial oversight.” Democrats believed they had negotiated a deal with the administration’s Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, to limit the law to addressing foreign surveillance wiretaps, but, Huq writes, “the White House torpedoed that deal and won a far broader law.” The law removes any real accountability over domestic surveillance by either Congress or the judiciary. Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi says that the PAA provides “unlimited access to currently protected personal information that is already accessible through an oversight procedure.” The law is part of the administration’s continual attempts to “eviscerat[e]” the checks and balances that form the foundation of US democracy. Ramifications - The law includes the provision that warrantless surveillance can be “directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States.” Huq writes that this is a tremendously broad and vague standard that allows “freewheeling surveillance of Americans’ international calls and e-mails.” He adds: “The problem lies in the words ‘directed at.’ Under this language, the NSA could decide to ‘direct’ its surveillance at Peshawar, Pakistan—and seize all US calls going to and from there.… Simply put, the law is an open-ended invitation to collect Americans’ international calls and e-mails.” The law does not impose any restrictions on the reason for surveillance. National security concerns are no longer the standard for implementing surveillance of communications. And the phrase “reasonably believe” is uncertain. The provisions for oversight are, Huq writes, “risibly weak.” Surveillance need only be explained by presentations by the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to FISC, which has little room to invalidate any surveillance, and furthermore will not be informed of any specific cases of surveillance. As for Congress, the Attorney General only need inform that body of “incidents of noncompliance” as reported by the administration. Congress must rely on the administration to police itself; it cannot demand particulars or examine documentation for itself. The law expires in six months, but, Huq notes, that deadline comes up in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign, with all the pressures that entails. And the law allows “the NSA to continue wielding its new surveillance powers for up to a year afterward.” The law, Huq writes, “does not enhance security-related surveillance powers. Rather, it allows the government to spy when there is no security justification. And it abandons all but the pretense of oversight.” [Nation, 8/7/2007]

Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean considers the newly passed Protect America Act (PAA—see August 5, 2007) a dire threat to American civil liberties. Dean writes that the ire of rank-and-file Democrats with their Congressional leadership is well earned, that the Democrats meekly lined up and voted it into law after some pro forma protestations. Dean notes that editorialists from around the country, and organizations as politically disparate as the ACLU (see August 6, 2007), the Cato Institute, and the John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) all agree that the new law is a serious threat to civil liberties. They all agree that the law violates the Fourth Amendment while at the same time hides its operations under the rubric of national security secrecy. Dean notes, “Congress was not even certain about the full extent of what it has authorized because President Bush and Vice President Cheney refused to reveal it.” Executive Power Grab - Dean writes that as much of a threat as the PAA is to citizens’ privacy, it is more threatening because it is another step in the Bush administration’s push for enhancing the powers of the executive branch at the expense of the legislative and judiciary branches, a move towards a so-called “unitary executive.” Bush and Cheney have worked relentlessly “to weaken or eliminate all checks and balances constraining the executive,” Dean writes, pointing to “countless laws enacted by the Republican-controlled Congresses during the first six years of the administration, and in countless signing statements added by the president interpreting away any constraints on the Executive.” The new law “utterly fails to maintain any real check on the president’s power to undertake electronic surveillance of literally millions of Americans. This is an invitation to abuse, especially for a president like the current incumbent.” Repairing the Damage - Dean is guardedly optimistic about the Democrats’ stated intentions to craft a new law that will supersede the PAA, which expires in February 2008, and restore some of the protections the PAA voids. Any such legislation may be quickly challenged by the Bush administration, which wants retroactive legislative immunity from prosecution for both US telecommunications firms cooperating with the government in monitoring Americans’ communications, and for government officials who may have violated the law in implementing domestic surveillance. Dean writes: “[B]efore Congress caved and gave Bush power to conduct this surveillance, he and telecommunication companies simply opted to do so illegally. Now, Bush will claim, with some justification, that because Congress has now made legal actions that were previously illegal, it should retroactively clear up this nasty problem facing all those who broke the law at his command.” Dean writes that Democrats need only do one thing to “fix [this] dangerous law: [add] meaningful accountability.” He continues: “They must do so, or face the consequences. No one wants to deny the intelligence community all the tools it needs. But regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, no Congress should trust any president with unbridled powers of surveillance over Americans. It is not the way our system is supposed to work.” [FindLaw, 8/10/2007]

Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, writes an op-ed for the New York Times pushing for Congressional immunity for US telecommunications firms over their cooperation with the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Under August’s Protect America Act, McConnell writes, the country is “safer” from terrorist attacks while the privacy of US citizens is protected (see August 5, 2007). The government has “greater understanding of international [al-]Qaeda networks, and the law has allowed us to obtain significant insight into terrorist planning.” But the Act expires in two months, and McConnell wants it re-enacted and significantly expanded “if we are to stay ahead of terrorists who are determined to attack the United States.” Echoing the arguments of Bush administration officials, McConnell attacks the “outdated” Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as significantly hindering the government’s “ability to collect timely foreign intelligence.” McConnell complains: “Our experts were diverted from tracking foreign threats to writing lengthy justifications to collect information from a person in a foreign country, simply to satisfy an outdated statute that did not reflect the ways our adversaries communicate. The judicial process intended to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans was applied instead to foreign intelligence targets in foreign countries. This made little sense, and the Protect America Act eliminated this problem.” McConnell calls for new legislation that would obviate the need for intelligence agencies such as the NSA to seek warrants to monitor US citizens’ telephone and e-mail communications: “The intelligence community should spend its time protecting our nation, not providing privacy protections to foreign terrorists and other diffuse international threats.” He also calls for retroactive immunity for “private parties”—i.e. the US telecommunications companies—that are subject to lawsuits over their cooperation with the NSA in monitoring US communications. “The intelligence community cannot go it alone,” he writes. “Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits.” Two days later, new Attorney General Michael Mukasey will write a virtually identical op-ed for the Los Angeles Times (see December 12, 2007). [New York Times, 12/10/2007]

The House of Representatives votes to hold White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress. Bolten and Miers have refused to testify to a House committee investigating the firing of several US attorneys. Many House Republicans walk off the House floor before the vote is cast, ostensibly because they want to work on reauthorizing the Protect America Act (see August 5, 2007) rather than deal with the contempt citation. Minority Leader John Boehner complains, “We have space on the calendar today for a politically charged fishing expedition, but no space for a bill that would protect the American people from terrorists who want to kill us.” [Associated Press, 2/14/2008] “We will not stand for this, and we will not stay for this. And I would ask my House Republican colleagues and those who believe we should be protecting the American people, to not vote on this bill. Let’s just get up and leave.” [Think Progress, 2/14/2008] (Before they walk out, Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL) attempts to disrupt the memorial service for the recently deceased Tom Lantos (D-CA), taking place in Statuary Hall just a few steps from the House chambers, by calling for a procedural vote during the memorial service. An MSNBC reporter says Diaz-Balart’s action is apparently the result of “pique.”) [MSNBC, 2/14/2008] The contempt citation will be forwarded to the US Attorney for the District of Columbia. The two resolutions passed hold Bolten and Miers in contempt, and allow for the House to file a civil suit against the Bush administration to compel the aides’ testimony. “I hope this administration will realize this Congress is serious about its constitutional role of oversight,” says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Pelosi says she “had hoped that this day would never have come,” and adds that if the White House instructs Justice Department attorneys not to prosecute the contempt citations, “we will have power to go to federal court and seek civil enforcement of our subpoenas.” [The Hill, 2/14/2008; Associated Press, 2/14/2008]White House Conditions 'Beyond Arrogance' - The White House has already said it will not allow the Justice Department to pursue the contempt charges, claiming that the information is off-limits because of executive privilege, and that Bolten and Miers are immune from prosecution. House Democrats such as Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) had tried for months to work with the White House to win its approval for the aides’ testimony, but were unwilling to accept the White House’s restrictive conditions—investigators would not have been allowed to make transcripts of the testimony, to copy documents presented in the testimony, or to seek any more information after the single session. Pelosi said of the White House’s conditions, “This is beyond arrogance. It’s hubris taken to the ultimate degree.” Republicans Say Testimony Would 'Undermine' Power of Executive Branch - Republicans such as David Dreier (R-CA) warn that such a case might “undermine the power of the first [executive] branch of government.” [The Hill, 2/14/2008; Associated Press, 2/14/2008]Miller: Bush Attempting to 'Decide by Decree' - Representative Brad Miller (D-NC) says during the deliberations, “The president cannot decide by decree. The president cannot announce with absolute unreviewable authority what information the administration will provide or withhold. The framers of our Constitution had just fought a war against an autocratic king. It is inconceivable that they intended to create an executive branch with the power the Bush administration now claims and that the minority now supports.” [Speaker of the House, 2/14/2008]

Admiral Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, admits during a radio interview that the main issue over the renewal of the Protect America Act (PAA) (see August 5, 2007) is not the security and safety of the nation, but the need to extend liability immunity to the nation’s telecommunications firms. In recent days, President Bush has said that unnamed terrorists are planning attacks on the US that will make 9/11 “pale by comparison,” and the only way to stop those attacks is to renew the PAA with new provisions that will grant telecommunications firms such as BellSouth, Verizon, and AT&T retroactive immunity from prosecution. Those firms are accused of illegally aiding the government in electronically monitoring the telephone and e-mail conversations of US citizens (see February 5, 2006). The PAA expires on February 16, but the government can operate under its provisions for another year. McConnell tells a National Public Radio reporter that the biggest issue surrounding the legislation is liability protection for the telecom firms. “We can’t do this mission without their help,” he says. “Currently there is no retroactive liability protection for them. They’re being sued for billions of dollars.” They did not break the law, McConnell asserts, but the lawsuits are curtailing their willingness to cooperate with the government. “The Senate committee that passed the bill examined the activities of the telecom companies and concluded they were not violating the law,” he says. By not extending retroactive immunity, McConnell says, “we’d lose the capability to protect the country.” [National Public Radio, 2/15/2008] Two days later, McConnell echoes his unusually frank admission. Interviewed on Fox News, he says: “Let me make one other point just—very important. The entire issue here is liability protection for the carriers. And so the old law and extended law are an expired law if we don’t have retroactive liability protection for the carriers. They are less inclined to help us, and so their support.… And therefore, we do not have the agility and the speed that we had before to be able to move and try to capture [terrorists’] communications to thwart their planning.” He also implies that the argument against granting immunity—if the telecoms’ actions were legal in the first place then they wouldn’t need immunity—is valid. Interviewer Chris Wallace says: “Isn’t the central issue here that you’ve lost your power to compel telecommunications companies to cooperate with you and also your ability to offer them legal immunity? Again, the Democrats would say, ‘Look, if the cooperation is legal, they don’t need legal immunity.’” McConnell replies: “Exactly right. The issue now is there’s uncertainty because the law has expired and the law of August, the Protect America Act, allowed us to compel—compel—support from a private carrier. That’s now expired.… [T]he private sector, although willingly helped us [sic] in the past, are now saying, ‘You can’t protect me. Why should I help you?’” Interestingly, after all of the talk of imminent terror attacks, when Wallace asks, “Do you believe al-Qaeda is more of a threat now than any time since 9/11?” McConnell says flatly: “No. Following 9/11, al-Qaeda’s leadership and operatives were degraded probably two-thirds or three-quarters.” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) responds that the administration’s attempt to tie the renewal of the PAA into the threat of future terrorist attacks is “wrong, divisive and nothing but fear-mongering.” Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) adds that McConnell’s “latest comments show yet again the shamelessness of the administration’s tactics.” [Fox News, 2/17/2008]

The Protect America Act (PAA—see August 5, 2007) expires today. Congress has refused to pass a reauthorization of the legislation that contains a provision to grant retroactive immunity to US telecommunications firms to protect them from lawsuits arising from their previous cooperation with government eavesdroppers (see February 5, 2006). President Bush has warned for days that by refusing to reauthorize the bill, Congress is leaving the US “more in danger of attack.” The surveillance elements of the PAA will continue in force for another year after its passage even as the PAA itself expires, so the government’s capability to use electronic surveillance against suspected terrorists and citizens alike continues unabated through August 2008. Republican Reaction - House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) warns, “This is a grave problem, and the Democrat leaders ought to be held accountable for their inaction.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) says, “The companies have been waiting for six months for retroactive liability” protection. “They are under pressure from their directors, pressure from their shareholders, and you’re jeopardizing the entire existence of the company by continuing to do this.” Democratic Reaction - But House Democrats seem to be in no mood to give in to Bush’s rhetoric. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says Bush is “misrepresenting the facts on our nation’s electronic-surveillance capabilities.” “There is no risk the program will go dark,” says Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Many Democrats accuse the administration of putting the interests of telecom firms over national security—accusations that intensify after Bush’s Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, admitted that the real issue behind the reauthorization is the immunity for telecoms (see February 15-17, 2008). Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) says that the entire argument is “nothing more than a scare tactic designed to avoid legal and political accountability and keep Americans in the dark about the administration’s massive lawbreaking.” House member Tim Walz (D-MN) says, “Coming from a military background, I sure don’t downplay that there are threats out there, but the president’s demagoguery on this is the equivalent of the boy crying wolf.” And Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), the head of the House Democratic Caucus, says bluntly: “This is not about protecting Americans. The president just wants to protect American telephone companies.” Previous Depiction - When the law was signed into effect August 5, 2007, it was portrayed by the White House as “a temporary, narrowly focused statute to deal with the most immediate needs of the intelligence community to protect the country.” Now it is being portrayed by Bush officials as the cornerstone of the nation’s terrorist-surveillance program. The issue is sure to resurface when Congress returns from a week-long break in late February. [Associated Press, 2/14/2008; Washington Post, 2/16/2008]

President Bush again demands that Congress reinstate the Protect America Act (PAA) (see August 5, 2007), with new provisions providing the nation’s telecommunications industry retroactive legal immunity from criminal and civil prosecution for possible crimes committed in the administration’s domestic wiretapping program (see May 12, 2006). Bush says that without such immunity, US telecom firms will be reluctant to help the administration spy on potential terrorists. The PAA is a central part of the legislative update of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (see 1978) which mandates that any wiretaps must receive the approval of the FISA Court. Bush insists that he will veto an update to FISA without the immunity provisions, even as he asserts the country is at risk of further terrorist attacks without the FISA updates, and after letting the PAA lapse without signing an extension of the legislation into law. However, Bush blames Congress for not passing the FISA update with an immunity clause: “Congress’ failure to pass this legislation was irresponsible,” he says. “In other words, the House’s refusal to act is undermining our ability to get cooperation from private companies. And that undermines our efforts to protect us from terrorist attack.” He explains why the Democrats don’t want his bill: “House leaders are blocking this legislation, and the reason can be summed up in three words: class action lawsuits.” A spokesman for Congressional Democrats retorts: “They cannot have it both ways. If it is true that the expiration of the [surveillance law] has caused gaps in intelligence, then it was irresponsible for the president and Congressional Republicans to openly oppose an extension of the law.” Democrats Put Trial Lawyers Before National Security? - Bush says: “The Senate bill would prevent plaintiffs’ attorneys from suing companies believed to have helped defend America after the 9/11 attacks. More than 40 of these lawsuits have been filed, seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in damages from these companies.… It is unfair and unjust to threaten these companies with financial ruin only because they are believed to have done the right thing and helped their country.” The lawsuits (see June 26, 2006) seek damages based upon violations of FISA, the Wiretap Act, the Communications Act, and the Stored Communications Act, among other laws. Bob Edgar of Common Cause says neither money nor punishment is the issue: “Innocent Americans who have had their rights violated by the telecoms deserve their day in court. If these companies did nothing wrong, then they have nothing to fear.” Bush is apparently attempting to refocus the issue as an attack on trial lawyers—traditionally a group supportive of Democrats—in saying: “Members of the House have a choice to make: They can empower the trial bar—or they can empower the intelligence community. They can help class action trial lawyers sue for billions of dollars—or they can help our intelligence officials protect millions of lives. They can put our national security in the hands of plaintiffs’ lawyers—or they can entrust it to the men and women of our government who work day and night to keep us safe.” House member John Conyers (D-MI) calls such characterizations “irresponsible” and “inaccurate.” [CBS News, 2/23/2008]

President Bush signs the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), a revamping and expansion of the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (see 1978). The legislation passed the House by a sweeping 293 to 129 votes, with most Democratic Congressional leaders supporting it over the opposition of the more liberal and civil liberties-minded Democrats. Republicans were almost unanimously supportive of the bill. Though Democratic Senators Russell Feingold (D-WI) and Christopher Dodd (D-CT) managed to delay the bill’s passage through the Senate, their attempt to modify the bill was thwarted by a 66-32 margin. (Dodd credits AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein (see December 15-31, 2005 and July 7, 2009) as one of the very few people to make the public aware of the illegal NSA wiretapping program, which the FISA amendment would protect. Without Klein, Dodd states, “this story might have remained secret for years and years, causing further erosion of our rights.”) Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, gave his qualified support to the bill, stating: “Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as president, I will carefully monitor the program.” Obama had opposed an earlier Senate version that would have given “blanket immunity” to the telecommunications companies for their participation in the illegal NSA wiretapping program (see December 15, 2005). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who organized Democratic support for the bill in the House, said that she supported the bill primarily because it rejects Bush’s argument that a wartime chief executive has the “inherent authority” to conduct some surveillance activity he considers necessary to fight terrorism. It restores the legal notion that the FISA law is the exclusive rule on government spying, she said, and added: “This is a democracy. It is not a monarchy.” Feingold, however, said that the bill granted “retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that may have engaged in President Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.” The amendments restore many of the provisions of the expired Protect America Act (PAA—see August 5, 2007) that drastically modify the original FISA legislation and grant the government broad new surveillance powers. Like the PAA, the FAA grants “third parties” such as telecommunications firms immunity from prosecution for engaging in illegal surveillance of American citizens if they did so in partnership with government agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA). [Washington Post, 6/20/2008; CNN, 6/26/2008; US Senate, 7/9/2008; White House, 7/10/2008; Klein, 2009, pp. 95-97] Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) actually refused to honor a “hold” placed on the bill by Dodd, a highly unusual move. Klein will later note that Reid has in the past always honored holds placed on legislation by Republicans, even if Democrats were strongly supportive of the legislation being “held.” Klein will write that Pelosi crafted a “showpiece” FISA bill without the immunity provisions, garnering much praise for her from civil liberties organizations; however, Pelosi’s colleague House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) had secretly worked with the White House to craft a bill that preserved immunity for telecoms, and on June 10, Pelosi “rammed” that bill through the House. The final bill actually requires the judiciary to dismiss lawsuits brought against telecom firms if those firms can produce evidence that they had worked in collusion with the NSA. Feingold later observes that the final bill is not a “compromise, it is a capitulation.” [Klein, 2009, pp. 101-103] Klein will write that Democrats and Republicans have worked together to “unw[ind] one of the main reforms of the post-Watergate era and accepted the outrageous criminal rationalizations of [President] Nixon himself.” Klein will quote Nixon as saying, “If the president does it, that means it’s not illegal” (see April 6, 1977), and will say that is “the essence of the FISA ‘compromise’” and turned Congress into the White House’s “rubber stamp.… It is the twisted judicial logic of a dictatorship.” [Klein, 2009, pp. 107]

Ron Paul (R-TX), a US representative and candidate for the Republican nomination for president, gives the keynote address to the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011)‘s 50th Anniversary Celebration. [New American, 10/8/2008] The JBS is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent right-wing extremist group that has accused a number of lawmakers, including former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, of being “closet Communists,” and promotes “wild conspiracy theories” such as the “international Jewish” conspiracy to control the global economy and the idea that the World War II Holocaust never happened. The JBS has been a pioneer in what an analysis by Political Research Associates (PRA) will call “the encoding of implicit cultural forms of ethnocentric white racism and Christian nationalist antisemitism rather than relying on the white supremacist biological determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right prior to WWII.” PRA will note, “Throughout its existence, however, the society has promoted open homophobia and sexism.” [Political Research Associates, 2010; Southern Poverty Law Center, 8/17/2010] The New American, the online magazine of the JBS (though the publication’s Web site downplays its connection to the JBS), will cover Paul’s speech. Paul speaks on the topic, “Restoring the Republic: Lessons From a Presidential Campaign,” where he discusses how America can be “restored” with groups such as the JBS and his own Campaign for Liberty “leading the way.” Paul is introduced by John McManus, the president of the JBS. According to the New American report: “Dr. Paul made evident his affection for the JBS by stating at the outset, ‘I am delighted to help celebrate this birthday.’ And when he moved on to talk about his first successful campaign for Congress in 1976, he said, ‘I’m sure there are people in this room who probably helped me in that campaign, because I know that so many of you have over the years.’ He then described his first press conference at the Capitol Hill Club, during which an antagonist from Houston asked him: ‘Mr. Paul, are you a member of the John Birch Society? Have you ever been a member of the John Birch Society?’ Dr. Paul recalled his response: ‘No, I am not a member of the John Birch Society but many members of the John Birch Society are friends of mine and they have been very helpful in my campaign.’” Paul credits the JBS “for keeping alive the freedom fight through its programs to educate and motivate the American people. He went on to point out that the JBS had planted a lot of seeds over the years and that his presidential campaign was able to tap into the sentiment that sprouted from those efforts.” Paul repeatedly cites what he calls “the remnant,” which he defines as those who remember and respect the values upon which the United States was founded: self-reliance, personal responsibility, limited government, sound money, the gold standard, etc. Paul lauds the JBS for nurturing that “remnant,” adding, “The remnant holds the truth together, both the religious truth and the political truth.” He concludes with an exhortation for the audience to “continue what you have been doing,” and says, “I come with a positive message and congratulations to you for all you have done.” [New American, 10/8/2008] Paul’s newsletters contain a raft of bigoted material (see 1978-1996), though Paul denies writing almost all of his newsletters’ content (see January 16, 2008). In 2007, he readily admitted his support for the John Birch Society (see July 22, 2007).

Alaskan Independence Party logo. [Source: Alaskan Independence Party]Reporters and authors Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert compile an investigative report for Salon that documents the large, if shadowy, network of far-right militia support that Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) enjoys. Palin is running for vice president with presidential candidate John McCain (R-AZ). Two of her most powerful supporters are Mark Chryson, the former head of the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), and Steve Stoll, a far-right activist and member of the John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) known in his home region of the Mat-Su Valley as “Black Helicopter Steve.” Both Chryson and Stoll are large financial contributors to Palin’s various political campaigns, and, as Blumenthal and Neiwert write, “they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during, and after her victory,” referring to her successful campaigns for mayor of Wasilla (see Mid and Late 1996) and, later, Alaska’s governor. Chryson’s AIP fought to eliminate taxes, support what it called “traditional family” values, remove all restraints from gun ownership, and perhaps most controversially, force Alaska to secede from the United States. Still a proud AIP member, Chryson tells the reporters that he still has “enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement,” but assures the rest of the nation, “We want to go our separate ways, but we are not going to kill you.” Under Chryson’s leadership and on into the present, the AIP works to connect with like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South of the US. Chryson is from Wasilla, Palin’s hometown, and during the 1990s his support was critical in making Palin the mayor of Wasilla and later the governor of Alaska. He and Stoll played an equally critical role in shaping her political agenda after her victories. Governor Palin often worked closely with Chryson as he and the AIP worked to successfully advance a wave of anti-tax, pro-gun legislative initiatives, and helped Chryson put through a change in Alaska’s Constitution to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. As both mayor and governor, Palin and Chryson worked together to extract revenge against local officials they disliked. Palin often took Chryson and Stoll’s advice on hiring government officials. “Every time I showed up [in Wasilla] her door was open,” Chryson says. “And that policy continued when she became governor.” Originally Saw Palin as Too Accomodating with Democrats - Chryson first met Palin in the early 1990s, when he was a member of a local libertarian pressure group called SAGE, or Standing Against Government Excess. He met her through SAGE founder Tammy McGraw, who was Palin’s birth coach. Palin was a leader in a pro-sales tax citizens group called WOW, or Watch Over Wasilla, which helped her win a seat on the Wasilla City Council in 1992. Chryson liked her, but considered her too willing to work with council Democrats to be of use to him. Chryson was then jockeying to become head of the AIP, a powerful political party that in 1990 had elected Wally Hickel (AIP-AK) as governor; Palin wanted to be mayor of Wasilla. Chryson and Palin quickly determined that they could help one another. Chryson became leader of the AIP in 1997, and saw Palin as a chance for the AIP to take its message more mainstream. He helped quiet the more racist members and platform planks of the AIP, and reached out to Alaska’s growing Christian-right movement by emphasizing AIP’s commitment to “traditional family” values and its opposition to gay rights. Chryson even succeeded in softening the AIP’s insistence on secession. Chryson is an expert at crafting his political message to appeal to disparate groups, and succeeded in forging alliances with white supremacists, far-right theocrats, neo-Confederates, and more moderate right-wing groups that do not advocate open racism, rebellion, Christian theocracy, or violence. In 1995, Palin’s husband Todd joined the AIP, further cementing Chryson’s increasing support of Palin. Palin Secured AIP Support for Mayorality - With Stoll, Chryson helped gain Palin the mayorship of Wasilla in the 1996 election, comforted by Palin’s steady move rightward as she continued her tenure on the city council. Palin’s opponent in that election, Republican John Stein, will later say of Chryson and Stoll: “She got support from these guys. I think smart politicians never utter those kind of radical things, but they let other people do it for them. I never recall Sarah saying she supported the militia or taking a public stand like that. But these guys were definitely behind Sarah, thinking she was the more conservative choice.… They worked behind the scenes. I think they had a lot of influence in terms of helping with the back-scatter negative campaigning.” Chryson helped Palin craft a successful campaign based on personal attacks on her opponents, both Stein and her Democratic opponent. Palin characterized Stein as a closet Jew and a sexist, both mischaracterizations, and falsely challenged the legal status of his marriage. Wasilla resident Phil Munger, a close friend of Stein’s, recalls, “I watched that campaign unfold, bringing a level of slime our community hadn’t seen until then.” Chryson helped Palin thwart a local gun-control measure (see June 1997). Chryson and Palin attempted to name Stoll to an empty seat on the Wasilla City Council, but were thwarted by another councilman, Nick Carney, who considered Stoll too “violent” to be a successful council member. Implementing AIP Agenda as Governor - Chryson recalls helping Governor Palin slash property taxes and block a measure that would have taken money for public programs from the Permanent Fund Dividend, or the oil and gas fund that doles out annual payments to citizens of Alaska. Palin endorsed Chryson’s unsuccessful initiative to move the state legislature from Juneau to Wasilla. She was successful at helping Chryson get pro-militia and gun-rights language into the Alaska Constitution. In 2006, Chryson helped Palin bring Hickel on board as the co-chairman of her gubernatorial campaign; Hickel’s presence meant the implicit endorsement of the AIP for Palin’s candidacy. Hickel later said of his support, “I made her governor.” Hickel now supports Palin’s bid for the vice-presidency, spurred in part by her explicit endorsement of the AIP agenda (see March 2008). Infiltrating the Mainstream - Chryson has long advocated that AIP members “infiltrate” both Republican and Democratic parties, and points to Palin as a model of successful infiltration. “There’s a lot of talk of her moving up,” AIP vice chairman Dexter Clark says of Palin. “She was a member [of the AIP] when she was mayor of a small town, that was a nonpartisan job. But to get along and to go along she switched to the Republican Party.… She is pretty well sympathetic because of her membership.” It is possible, Blumenthal and Neiwert speculate, that Clark saw Palin as so closely aligned with Chryson and the AIP that he wrongly assumed she was an official member. Chryson understands that as a vice-presidential candidate, Palin has no intention of espousing secessionist or racist views. Indeed, he hopes that her inauguration will represent the beginning of a new and deeper infiltration. “I’ve had my issues but she’s still staying true to her core values,” Chryson says. “Sarah’s friends don’t all agree with her, but do they respect her? Do they respect her ideology and her values? Definitely.” [Salon, 10/10/2008] In the days after this article appears, the McCain-Palin campaign will confirm that Sarah Palin has been a registered Republican since 1982, and claim that she was never a member of AIP. AIP chairperson Lynette Clark will say that her husband Dexter’s recollection of Palin as an official AIP member is mistaken, and reiterate that she and AIP support Palin fully in her bid for the vice presidency. [ABC News, 9/1/2008; Alaskan Independence Party, 9/3/2008]

Mark Ames. [Source: Guardian]CNBC’s Rick Santelli has become something of a superstar among conservative media pundits and others exasperated by the Obama economic bailouts, after engaging in a purportedly impromptu “rant” during an on-air broadcast (see February 19, 2009). Investigative reporters Mark Ames and Yasha Levine discover that Santelli’s rant may have been a pre-planned incident timed to coincide with the launch of a so-called “tea party movement” predicated on opposing the Obama administration and supporting conservative and Republican ideas and agendas. In the hours and days following Santelli’s appearance on CNBC, the authors write, “[a] nationwide ‘tea party’ grassroots Internet protest movement has sprung up seemingly spontaneously, all inspired by Santelli, with rallies planned today in cities from coast to coast to protest against Obama’s economic policies.” Connections to the Koch Family - Ames and Levine write that Santelli’s CNBC “rant” was “a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a ‘Chicago Tea Party’ was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest right-wing oligarch clans this country has ever produced.” Ames and Levine are referring to the Koch family, headed by Fred Koch (see 1940 and After), the billionaire co-founder of the extremist John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) and whose sons are heavy donors to right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups such as the Cato Institute (see 1977-Present) and FreedomWorks (see 1984 and After). ChicagoTeaParty.com - On the air, Santelli said, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July, all you capitalists who want to come down to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.” Within minutes, Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report had posted headlines about the “tea party” rant on his Web site. Within hours, a new Web site, chicagoteaparty.com, had appeared, featuring a YouTube video of Santelli’s rant and calling itself the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain name had been registered months before by right-wing media figure Zack Christenson (see August 2008), but had remained dormant until after Santelli spoke on CNBC. Ames and Levine note that Christenson bought the domain around the same time that Milt Rosenburg, the Chicago talk show host whom Christenson produces, began attempting to link then-presidential candidate Barack Obama with “left-wing terrorist” William Ayers (see August 2008). Ames and Levine write: “That Rosenberg’s producer owns the ‘chicagoteaparty.com’ site is already weird—but what’s even stranger is that he first bought the domain last August, right around the time of Rosenburg’s launch of the ‘Obama is a terrorist’ campaign. It’s as if they held this ‘Chicago tea party’ campaign in reserve, like a sleeper-site. Which is exactly what it was.” The Sam Adams Alliance - The ChicagoTeaParty.com Web site, Ames and Levine report, is part of a larger network of conservative Web sites set up over the last few months under the auspices of the “Sam Adams Alliance” (SAA), an organization linked to the Koch family and to FreedomWorks, a public relations group funded by Koch and headed by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey (see April 14, 2009). The SAA is a Chicago-area libertarian/conservative group named for Samuel Adams, who led the Boston Tea Party protest in 1773. [Playboy, 2/27/2009] In 2008, the New York Times described the SAA as having “started an ambitious project this year to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues.” [New York Times, 7/19/2008]OfficialChicagoTeaParty.com - Another Web site, officialchicagoteaparty.com, went live on February 19 as well. That site is registered to Eric Odom, a Republican specializing in faux-grassroots PR campaigns sometimes called “astroturf” (see April 15, 2009). Odom has worked with Koch Industries, a large oil and natural gas corporation and the source of the Koch family fortune, in supporting offshore oil-drilling legislation. Odom was, until January 2009, the “new media coordinator” for the Sam Adams Alliance. Upon his departure, the SAA removed Odom’s name from its Web site. The SAA also removed any mention of Koch’s funding, or any other connections between Koch and the organization, from its site. Two of the SAA’s board members, Eric O’Keefe and Joseph Lehman, are tied both to Koch and to FreedomWorks. FreedomWorks - In the hours after Santelli’s rant, FreedomWorks posted a large photo of Santelli on its Web site’s front page with the caption: “Are you with Rick? We are. Click here to learn more.” Other Sites - In the hours after Santelli’s rant, other Web sites such as Right.org, promoting a tea party support group that purports to be a citizen-launched organization “created by a few friends who were outraged by the bailouts” and headed by “Evan and Duncan,” and numerous pro-tea party Facebook pages, were launched. Right.org is sponsoring a $27,000 prize for an “anti-bailout video competition.” Ames and Levine ask: “Who are Evan and Duncan? Do they even really exist?” No Connections on the Surface - Ames and Levine note that the numerous Web sites and Facebook pages have remarkable similarities in language and appearance, “as if they were part of a multi-pronged advertising campaign planned out by a professional PR company. Yet, on the surface, they pretended to have no connection. The various sites set up their own Twitter feeds and Facebook pages dedicated to the Chicago Tea Party movement. And all of them linked to one another, using it as evidence that a decentralized, viral movement was already afoot. It wasn’t about partisanship; it was about real emotions coming straight from real people.” Santelli and the Tea Party Organizers - Ames and Levine ask why Santelli, and CNBC, would “risk their credibility, such as it is, as journalists dispensing financial information in order to act as PR fronts for a partisan campaign.” Santelli’s contract with CNBC is about to expire, they note. Until the “tea party” rant, Santelli was an obscure financial commentator with few prospects. Now, though, he is a “hero” of the right. As another Chicago tea party organization, the Daily Bail, wrote on its site: “Rick, this message is to you. You are a true American hero and there are no words to describe what you did today except your own. Headquartered nearby, we will be helping the organization in whatever way possible.” Ames and Levine speculate that Santelli may have been brought into the fold by one of his CNBC colleagues, Lawrence Kudlow, who himself has strong connections to FreedomWorks. [Playboy, 2/27/2009] Steve Megremis of the Daily Bail will call Ames and Levine’s allegations about his Web site’s involvement “categorically untrue,” writing: “It’s unfortunate because I believe that the article did some great investigative work and then at the end they threw me under the bus for no apparent reason. Apparently, the authors just assumed we were part of this conspiracy because of my own personal excitement about the prospect of a mid-summer tea party.” Megremis will post a response on his site, but the response will soon disappear. [Barry Ritholtz, 2/28/2009]Playboy Removes Article - By March 2, Playboy will remove the Ames and Levine article from its Web site. No explanation is offered. The article will instead become available on a Web site called “The Exiled,” which bills itself as an “alternative” press outlet. [Jeffrey Feldman, 3/2/2009]

Johnny Lee Clary. [Source: Christian Family Churches of Australia (.com)]The Reverend Johnny Lee Clary, who describes himself as a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who abandoned his allegiance to white supremacist ideology after converting to Christianity and now preaches against racism and white separatism, answers a number of questions about the Klan and related organizations on his Web site. The John Birch Society - According to Clary, the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) “is just a political version of the KKK, without the name of the KKK. They center on the political ideas of the Klan and are not as vocal in public on the ideas of the racial superiority, but they attract the same people and say the same things behind closed doors.… The John Birch Society is the Klan.… They are racist, and full of hate and are officially listed as a hate group with several civil rights organizations throughout the USA.” Tom Metzger, the founder and leader of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), is an active leader of a California chapter of the JBS, Clary writes, as are many other members of the Klan and various neo-Nazi and white supremacist militia groups. Clary explains why the Klan is openly racist and the JBS is not, stating: “The John Birch Society’s function is to recruit professional people into their ranks of anti-government conspiracy freaks, that would be too afraid to join an organization with the name of the KKK. They suck these people into their ranks and use the donations to further the cause of radical un-American fascist racist KKK activities. This is a ploy for the KKK to get funding to help spread their agenda.” In response to an email from a JBS member portraying his organization as “conservative,” Clary writes: “Please do not try to represent your organization as ‘conservative.’ You are not conservative, and are disowned by the Republican Party and are considered a disgrace to true conservatives everywhere. Ronald Reagan, the greatest conservative American ever, would have nothing to do with any of you. Neither will President Bush for that matter.” Positive Aspects of the Klan - While Clary repudiates the Klan’s racism, he says there are some “good” aspects to the organization: it “stands against abortion, homosexuality, and drug dealers. They are for prayer in the schools and the use of the Bible in the classroom. These are good things that would entice some people into joining the Klan, however, if someone joined because of these reasons they would soon see that the evil the Klan does is so sinister that it far outweighs the good. The Klan is guilty of bombings, murder, and hatred of their fellow man because of the shade of their skin.” Why the KKK Hates African-Americans - In response to a letter from an African-American student asking this question, Clary writes: “I believe that one of the reason’s the Klan hates African-Americans so much is because they look different [from whites]. By putting others down they make themselves feel superior. One who hates so much really does not like his or her own self. They know deep down inside that they are a loser in society and they are searching for some way to try to achieve some sort of superiority. You have to remember also that the majority of KKK members are what would be classified as ‘poor white trash.’ Very few Klan members come from upper middle class backgrounds or even middle class for that matter. They come from backgrounds that are poor and down trodden. Instead of doing something to better themselves they build up resentment until it turns into hatred. They blame the Jews, blacks, and others for their own failures in life and they are a product of a learned response. That is, they are taught to hate.… If the blacks were not around for Klansmen to hate, it would be the Jews and if they were not around it would be the Native American Indians and if not them then someone else. When no one else that appears to be different is around then they start hating and bickering with each other. Many of them are crying out for a separate ‘Aryan’ homeland. They scream for a place where people that believe like they do can all go and live and not have to be around other races. That could be a solution that would benefit everybody. Even if there were no other races around them, their hatred is so deeply imbedded within them that they would start hating each other and finally destroy one another.” [Johnny Lee Clary, 2007; Johnny Lee Clary, 4/13/2009]

Conservative author and pundit Pat Buchanan continues the argument that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) is a product of “affirmative action” (see May 28, 2009, May 29, 2009, and May 31, 2009). “By her own admission, Sotomayor is an ‘affirmative action baby,’” Buchanan writes, referring to a panel discussion from the early 1990s where she called herself a “product of affirmative action.” Buchanan writes that her stellar academic record, including graduating at the top of her class at both Princeton and Yale, is “a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.… Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review—all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender, or ethnicity. This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries. One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated ‘with the base alloy of hypocrisy.’” [Human Events, 6/12/2009; Media Matters, 6/14/2009]

English-only advocates Pat Buchanan and white nationalist Peter Brimelow standing under misspelled banner. [Source: Think Progress (.org)]Right-wing pundit Pat Buchanan and his organization The American Cause host a conference to discuss how Republicans can regain a political majority. The conference is co-sponsored by a number of white nationalist and white advocacy groups. The conference features a panel discussion supporting English-only initiatives as a way to attract “working-class white Democrats” to the Republican Party, and in the process ridicules Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) for her use of children’s books to study English while she was in college (see May 31, 2009). The panelists also suggest that, without English as the official language of the US, President Obama would force Americans to speak Spanish. The conference’s English-only advocates apparently do not notice that the banner hanging over the festivities prominently misspells the word “conference” as “conferenece.” [Media Matters, 6/11/2009; Think Progress, 6/22/2009]

Rachel Maddow and Pat Buchanan, during their discussion of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. [Source: MSNBC / Crooks and Liars]As the Senate readies to vote for or against Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court (see August 6, 2009), conservative commentator and author Pat Buchanan attempts to explain why he feels Sotomayor should not be confirmed. Affirmative Action Accusation - Buchanan, interviewed by MSNBC’s progressive host Rachel Maddow, has accused Sotomayor of being an “affirmative action” selection for the bench (see May 28, 2009, May 31, 2009, June 12, 2009, and June 20, 2009) who uses her position to “discriminate against white males.” As evidence of his claim, he says: “I do believe she’s an affirmative action appointment by the president of the United States. He eliminated everyone but four women and then he picked the Hispanic.” Maddow asks him to define affirmative action, and Buchanan replies, “Affirmative action is to increase diversity by discriminating against white males.” After citing four court cases, he adds: “[A]ffirmative action is basically reverse discrimination against white males and it’s as wrong as discrimination against black females and Hispanics and others. And that’s why I oppose it.” White People Built America, Buchanan Says - In her turn, Maddow asks, “Why do you think is that of the 110 Supreme Court justices we’ve had in this country, 108 of them have been white?” to which Buchanan responds: “Well, I think white men were 100 percent of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100 percent of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100 percent of people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Probably close to 100 percent of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks in this country who are 90 percent of the entire nation—in 1960, when I was growing up, Rachel—and the other 10 percent were African-American who had been discriminated against. That’s why.” Maddow asks if he believes “there are 108 of 110 white Supreme Court justices because white people essentially deserve to have 99.5 percent of those positions? That there’s nothing—that doesn’t reflect any sort of barrier to those positions by people who aren’t white. You think that’s what they’ve—you think that’s just purely on the basis of what white people have deserved to get?” Back to Affirmative Action - Buchanan shifts his argument and asserts that the Supreme Court should have the nine finest legal minds and scholars, regardless of race or gender. “But this one doesn’t have that. She was appointed because she’s a Latina, a Hispanic, and a woman.” Maddow counters with Sotomayor’s extensive experience, saying: “She is also the judicial nominee who has more judging experience than any judge has gone up in, say, in the past, I don’t know, what is it, 70 years? She has been an appellate court judge of some distinction for a lot longer than [Chief Justice John] Roberts was, [Justice Samuel] Alito was. I mean, it’s not like she was—she was picked out… she was like picked out of the minor leagues and brought up here, Pat.” Buchanan returns to his affirmative action argument, noting that Sotomayor agreed that she was granted admission to Princeton University because of the program. Buchanan goes farther, accusing her of receiving preferential treatment for all of her accomplishments, including her stint on the Yale Law Review and her appointment to the federal bench. Maddow, battling through Buchanan’s attempts to interrupt her, defends the affirmative action program, saying: “[W]hat our country needs is to be able to choose from the largest possible pool of talent in order to be able to pick the people who are going to have to function at the highest levels so that our country can compete and our country to do all the hard things we need do, I would hope that you would see that picking 108 out of 110 white justices… to the Supreme Court means that other people aren’t actually being appropriately considered. And the reason that you have affirmative action is that you recognize that the fact that people were discriminated against for hundreds of years in this country means that you sort of gained the system, unless you give other people a leg up.” She continues, “But, Pat, for you to argue that there’s no basis on which the United States benefits… from having Hispanics be among the people who we choose the best and brightest from defies belief.… The idea that you think we’ll best serve by only choosing among 99.9 percent white people.… [W]hen I look at the United States Supreme Court and I see 108 out of 110 white people, I see 108 out of 110 men. I’m—I don’t look at that and think, ‘God, white guys are naturally better at this type of work than other people who aren’t getting these jobs.’ I don’t think that way.… I want to hear you—I would love to hear your answer as to whether or not you think that is what explains it, too. Because, I think, what the more obvious explanation is, is that you have to be a white guy in order to get considered for these jobs and has been true since the dawn of time in this country.… That’s starting to break up now so that we can tap a bigger pool of talent. You should be happy about that for your country, Pat.” Buchanan counters that whites “are victims of this evil affirmative action policy which says in effect that everybody’s covered by the 14th Amendment and the civil rights laws unless you’re a white male and your parents and ancestors came from Europe. Then we can discriminate against you. That’s what I am against.” Stirring 'Up Racial Animus' - Countering Buchanan’s accusations of reverse racism, Maddow says: “Pat, I couldn’t disagree with you more. I tribute—I credit you sticking to your gun. I think you’re absolutely wrong about this and I think that by advocating that the Republican Party try to stir up racial animus among white voters.… You’re dating yourself.” Buchanan says that the government should “defend the legitimate rights of white working-class folks who are the victims of discrimination, because that’s the right thing to do and because it’s the politically right thing to do.” Maddow concludes: “A lot of things divide us, Pat. Race is one of those. But there’s a lot of other ways in which we just gratify as a country, and for you to privilege race and say that what we really need to make sure we tap, politically, is white people’s racial grievances, you’re playing with fire and you’re dating yourself. You’re living in the 1950s, Pat.” [MSNBC, 7/17/2009]

Reporter Lee Fang of the liberal Center for American Progress writes an op-ed for the Boston Globe comparing the current political attacks against Democratic efforts to reform health care being coordinated by the Koch brothers (see 1977-Present, 1979-1980, 1981-2010, 1984 and After, May 6, 2006, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, and November 2009) with the efforts of their father, Fred Koch (see 1940 and After), to label former President John F. Kennedy a traitor and a Communist tool. David Koch recently helped coordinate, from behind the scenes, a protest that compared health care reform to the Holocaust, and other protests that have turned violent. More systematically, he and his reclusive brother Charles have funded such conservative organizations as Americans for Prosperity (AFP—see Late 2004) and other front groups, none of which bear the Koch name. Fang writes: “Americans for Prosperity’s tactics are not new. Just as Koch inherited his oil business from his father, Americans for Prosperity borrows from the ultra-right group also founded in part by his dad, the John Birch Society” (see 1945 and After, March 10, 1961, 1963, August 4, 2008, and April 26, 2010). Fred Koch helped conceive the far-right, anti-Communist John Birch Society (JBS), which, Fang writes, “cloaked its pro-business, anti-civil rights agenda in the rhetoric of the Cold War.” The JBS labeled Kennedy a Communist-inspired traitor and advocated his impeachment (see November 1963), stood against taxation as another aspect of “creeping Communism” inside the federal government, and claimed that the civil rights movement was being directed by the Soviet Union (see April 13, 2009 and December 11, 2009). The JBS helped promote the 1964 presidential candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and helped Republicans win key Congressional seats in 1966. AFP and the JBS are alike, Fang notes, in that they rarely acknowledge their funding from wealthy corporate magnates. Both portray themselves as grassroots organizations that are dedicated to promoting freedom. For a time, the JBS succeeded in aligning the interests of the very rich with the idea of anti-Communist patriotism. Similarly, AFP promotes the interests of the extremely wealthy, including the Koch brothers, as synonymous with patriotic opposition to health care reform, financial regulation, net neutrality, and the estate tax. All are labeled as “socialist,” a favorite JBS epithet. Fang concludes that “[w]ith his millions,” David Koch will have “contributed greatly to the obstruction of universal health care, the denial of climate change, and the derailment of much of President Obama’s domestic agenda. His dad would be pleased.” [Boston Globe, 12/6/2009]

A portion of the poster for the film ‘Invictus,’ starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. [Source: Movie-list (.com)]The John Birch Society (JBS—see December 2011), the anti-Communist far-right organization, condemns a recent film treatment of the life of South African President Nelson Mandela, who led the battle against white apartheid in that nation. The film is Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela and written/directed by Clint Eastwood, one of a relatively small number of Hollywood conservatives. The JBS is outraged by the film’s sympathetic depiction of Mandela. Art Thompson, writing for the JBS Web site, notes: “The ‘conservative’ President George W. Bush awarded [Mandela] the Medal of Freedom. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him. The Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded him their prize, just as they did [President] Obama (see October 13, 2009). And, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics issued a commemorative stamp in his honor in 1988. This is a clue as to who Mandela really is.” Thompson labels Mandela a communist, citing “many, many pictures showing Mandela at communist functions, standing below the hammer and sickle and giving the communist salute. Presiding [sic] over communist conventions and other events staged by the South African Communist Party.” Thompson says the mainstream media chooses not to publicize these photographs: “A variety of techniques have been used to deprive us of pertinent facts, but none have been more successful than simply not reporting or showing the facts. You do not need to twist the facts, only withhold the facts.” Instead of being a hero of South Africa and for Africans worldwide, Thompson writes, “Mandela is nothing more than a communist terrorist thug, placed in prison because he was about to launch a terrorist campaign against South Africans, aimed more against the black population than the white.” He blames Mandela and his then-wife Winnie for “necklacing” black Africans, a practice carried out by both white apartheid supporters and black anti-apartheid activists in which opponents had gasoline-soaked automobile tires placed over their heads and set ablaze. Thompson claims that Mandela and his “thugs” “necklaced” their “anti-communist victims.” Americans have been lied to for years about Mandela, Thompson claims, and explains why: “Even today, Americans can not be allowed by our controlled media to understand that South Africa has a communist government. Africa is rapidly going communist as are the nations south of our own border. We are being manipulated into keeping our eyes on the Middle East. The danger looms elsewhere. Communism is really only dead in the minds of the American people. It is too bad that we do not see a reality show in television about that.” [John Birch Society, 12/11/2009] While there is no proof that Nelson Mandela endorsed or tolerated “necklacing,” it has been well established that his former wife Winnie did so during her time as a spokesperson for the African National Congress (ANC). [Associated Press, 6/13/1992; BBC, 11/29/1997] US Representative Ron Paul, seen by many as the “father” of the US “tea party” movement, is a staunch JBS supporter, though he is not an official member (see August 4, 2008). Paul has attacked Mandela in his newsletters, labeling him a “communist” (see 1978-1996).

Conservative author Jonathan Kay covers the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee (see February 4-6, 2010), and publishes a column that states: “[I]t has become clear to me that the movement is dominated by people whose vision of the government is conspiratorial and dangerously detached from reality. It’s more John Birch than John Adams.” Kay, who is writing a book on alternative theories about the 9/11 attacks, is astonished at the breadth and depth of the conspiracy theories that many tea parties, and tea party organizations, seem to embrace. The “villain list,” as Kay calls it, includes banks; bailed-out corporations; Republican Party leaders such as RNC chairman Michael Steele, whom they feel ignore the tea parties; colleges and universities; CNN’s Anderson Cooper; Fox News pundits like Bill O’Reilly who scorn them; “big media” outlets such as the Washington Post; and even moviemakers like James Cameron, who make movies that they feel contain “hidden messages” to fool Americans into supporting gay rights, cuts in military spending, and the like. The central figure in their net of conspiracy theories, Kay writes, is Barack Obama (see May 7, 2010). The convention is opened by anti-environmentalist Steve Malloy, who accuses Obama and his administration of working to control every aspect of Americans’ lives, from the colors of their cars to the temperatures to which they set their home heating units, all to comply with what Malloy says is the United Nations’s greenhouse gas-reduction program. According to Malloy: “Obama isn’t a US socialist. He’s an international socialist. He envisions a one-world government.” Kay is particularly concerned that, based on what he hears at the convention, the tea parties are affiliating themselves with far-right, white supremacist ideology such as that espoused by the John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011). They seem particularly enamored of the “New World Order” conspiracy (see September 11, 1990, November 5, 2008, March 17, 2009, March 18, 2009, March 24, 2009, March 24, 2009, and April 6, 2009). A convention speaker, former judge Roy Moore, tells his listeners that Obama intends to station “a UN guard in every house[hold].” Radio host Alex Jones is a favorite among tea partiers, Kay writes; Jones claims that Obama’s presidency is a plot by the leaders of the New World Order to “con the Amercican people into accepting global slavery.” One conventioneer tells Kay that Washington liberals “engineered the financial crash so they could destroy the value of the US dollar, pay off America’s debts with worthless paper, and then create a new currency called the Amero that would be used in a newly created ‘North American Currency Union’ with Canada and Mexico.” Shortly thereafter, the convention shows a “documentary” entitled Generation Zero that makes similar claims. The claims that Obama is a Kenyan who is ineligible to be president is a favorite theory, Kay writes; WorldNetDaily publisher Joseph Farah (see August 1, 2008 and After, December 5, 2008, May 28, 2009, July 21, 2009, and August 1-4, 2009) tells the crowd that the circumstances of Obama’s birth are more mysterious than the birth of Jesus Christ, and says, “My dream is that if Barack Obama seeks reelection in 2012 that he won’t be able to go to any city, any city, any town in America without seeing signs that ask, ‘Where’s the birth certificate?’” (see May 18, 2009). Kay concludes: “Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin’s Saturday night keynote address. It is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room. That doesn’t say much for the state of the right in America. The tea partiers’ tricornered hat is supposed to be a symbol of patriotism and constitutional first principles. But when you take a closer look, all you find is a helmet made of tin foil.” [National Tea Party Convention, 2/2010; Newsweek, 2/8/2010]

Richard Mack speaks to a tea party rally in Post Falls, Idaho, in November 2009. [Source: Rajah Bose / New York Times]The New York Times publishes a large front-page story on America’s “tea party” movement. The report is written by staff reporter David Barstow, who researched the story for five months, first joining a bus tour by the Tea Party Express (see August 28, 2009) and then staying for the month of October in and around Spokane, Washington, to interview tea party members and others, such as white supremacist militia members, who have some affiliation with tea party organizations. The first person he mentions is a retiree named Pam Stout, who once worked for federal housing programs and is now aghast at the government’s handling of the economic crisis. She told Barstow that one day “she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated—even manufactured—by both parties to grab power.” She went to a tea party rally, then a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots, where she surprised herself by nominating herself for president. Under her leadership, the Sandpoint group joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project (see March 13, 2009 and After), the extremist, anti-Communist John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), and the Oath Keepers (see March 9, 2009 and March 2010), a far-right militia organization. Stout told Barstow that her family worries that she has become enmeshed in a group of conspiracy theorists and ad hoc revolutionaries, but she said she has never felt more engaged. [New York Times, 2/15/2010; Columbia Journalism Review, 2/18/2010]Increasing Tilt towards Anti-Government Militia Ideology - Barstow writes that many tea party members are like Stout, with an inclination to conservative anti-government politics, but also with a fear of eventual government tyranny that has driven them to join the movement. “These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the tea party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement,” he writes, “a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates, and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve. Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show.” Many tea partiers hold former President Bush and President Obama in equal contempt, holding them jointly responsible for deliberately undermining the Constitution and the free market system “for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites” (see February 4-8, 2010). Coalition groups like Friends of Liberty are “forming hybrid entities of tea parties and groups rooted in the Patriot ethos. A fear of government tyranny is one of the most common ideological threads running through virtually all tea party organizations.” Targeting Republicans as Well as Democrats - Barstow continues: “These coalitions are not content with simply making the Republican Party more conservative. They have a larger goal—a political reordering that would drastically shrink the federal government and sweep away not just Mr. Obama, but much of the Republican establishment, starting with Senator John McCain” and other Republicans whom they consider part of the “government conspiracy” to destroy democracy. While tea parties routinely target Democrats in elections, they are also targeting more moderate Republicans, especially those who support ideas or legislation that they feel is part of the “conspiracy.” Republicans who supported the government bailouts of large corporations are being targeted, as are those who support global warming legislation or who have shown any impetus to work with the White House or with Congressional Democrats (see January 29, 2010). Barstow notes that the tea party movement is anything but homogenous and rigidly organized: “It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure.” Some groups are “essentially appendages of the local Republican Party,” but many are not. However, many of the beliefs espoused by individual tea partiers tend to be reflected in most groups. Not all believe that Obama wants to impose a dictatorship, with or without McCain’s help, but many do. The frustration expressed by Stout in the economy and the government’s response to it is echoed throughout tea party groups in every state. Turning to Radical Ideologies and Conspiracy Theorists - One of the tea partiers’ favorite thinkers is Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck (see March 29, 2009). Beck’s often-revisionist, often-inaccurate opinions led many tea partiers to read the Federalist Papers (or, more often, right-wing blogs about the Federalist Papers), conspiracist “exposes” of the Federal Reserve, and the novels of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Online resources tailored for tea party organizations provide a wealth of what Barstow calls “radical critiques of Washington.” Two of the primary sites are ResistNet.com and InfoWars, both of which combine far-right ideology with a plethora of conspiracy theories covering everything from 9/11 and the Federal Reserve to the New World Order (see September 11, 1990). Some tea partiers are joining with militia groups, or forming their own, and making stockpiles of food, gold, and weaponry to prepare for the end of civilization. Many tea party leaders say they believe that a return to a strict adherence to constitutional law would solve most of the nation’s problems, but many of them espouse a radical view of the Constitution, such as that delineated by radical Constitutional revisionist W. Cleon Skousen (first popularized among the tea party community by Beck—see 1963). Many want to completely do away with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the federal income tax, and most government agencies, all of which they say violate the Constitution. Some go even farther, advocating secession, states “nullfying” federal laws, and the formation of citizen militias. The tea parties in the Pacific Northwest, Barstow writes, have been shaped by influences such as libertarian Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) and by the sometimes-violent anti-government activism of northern Idaho (see Early 1970s, 1980-1982, 1983-1995, and February 15, 1995). The 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge (see August 31, 1992), which occurred in nearby Idaho, is a touchstone for many tea partiers, just as it was for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (see August 21-31, 1992). Many, but not all, tea party members and groups embrace the “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama is not a natural American citizen. A favorite news blog, WorldNetDaily, routinely electrifies the movement by warning of new White House plans to build massive internment camps and stuff them with tea party members, or of plans to send waves of United Nations troops throughout the nation to confiscate Americans’ guns. ResistNet regularly warns that Obama is trying to convert Interpol, the international police organization, into his own personal police force, and advises tea partiers to “grab their guns.” Tea partiers like Mary Johnson of New Mexico points to the Bush-era wiretapping scandal as proof that the government can, and is, preparing to bring democracy to an end. As the groups’ fear and contempt for the federal government grows, Barstow writes, they turn more frequently to “fringe” groups such as white supremacist, anti-government militias. In Indiana, a militia coalition called Defenders of Liberty is networking with tea party groups and other “Patriot” organizations throughout the state. Darin Stevens, the leader of the Spokane 9/12 project, told Barstow that before tuning in to Beck’s show, he had paid almost no attention to politics. After the recession hit and his personal financial structure started to collapse, he began watching Beck. “I had no clue that my country was being taken from me,” he explains. He began the Spokane chapter of Beck’s 9/12 project, and was astounded that 110 people attended the first meeting. Stevens now belongs to the Oath Keepers as well as the 9/12 Project. Spokane tea partier Leah Southwell became a convert after stumbling on Paul’s speeches on YouTube. Southwell turned from being a successful Mary Kay makeup sales representative to being a self-described member of “the uprising.” Southwell, through Paul, is now fully supportive of the Patriot ideology, and holds as evident truth a number of conspiracy theories involving the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. “The more you know, the madder you are,” she told Barstow. “I mean when you finally learn what the Federal Reserve is!” Southwell is now a local official with the John Birch Society. She says that the affiliation between organizations like the JBS and the tea parties will continue to grow: “Most of these people [tea partiers] are just waking up.” Former car salesman Richard Mack, a longtime militia supporter who co-wrote Ruby Ridge survivor Randy Weaver’s memoirs, is a favorite speaker at tea party events. “People just do not trust any of this,” Mack told Barstow. “It’s not just the fringe people anymore. These are just ordinary people—teachers, bankers, housewives.” Amorphous Structure - Local tea party groups often join, in one degree or another, one of several competing national tea party organizations such as ResistNet or the Tea Party Express, most of which are organized, staffed, and funded by conservative lobbying groups such as FreedomWorks (see February 16-17, 2009, February 19, 2009 and After, February 27, 2009, March 2, 2009, March 13, 2009 and After, April 14, 2009, and April 15, 2009) or Americans for Prosperity (see Late 2004, February 16-17, 2009, February 19, 2009 and After, and April 2009 and After). Some tea party groups have been joined by, or in some cases overrun by, other groups, from “birthers” to militias, supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, pro-gun groups, and the sovereign states movement. Many coalitions such as Friends of Liberty were formed in opposition to what leaders called the endless “hijack attempts” by state and county Republican Parties. Dann Selle of the Official Tea Party of Spokane told Barstow, “We had to stand our ground, I’ll be blunt.” Support from Elected Politicians - Rick Perry, the governor of Texas and a possible 2012 Republican candidate for president, has joined with Texas tea parties in supporting the state’s secession from the United States. Nevada Republican Joe Heck, who ran for Congress in 2008, attacked both parties for moving the nation towards “socialist tyranny” and solicited tea party support at a rally in Las Vegas. Indiana Republican Richard Behney, running for the US Senate, told tea party supporters that if the 2010 elections did not turn out to his liking: “I’m cleaning my guns and getting ready for the big show. And I’m serious about that, and I bet you are, too.” [New York Times, 2/15/2010]

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) interviews David Barstow, the New York Times reporter who just published a front-page research article about the “tea party” movement (see February 15, 2010). Barstow says the article was sparked by the raucous, sometimes-violent events of the “town halls” of the summer of 2009 (see July 23, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 28, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6-7, 2009, August 6-8, 2009, August 7, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 10, 2009, August 10, 2009, and August 11, 2009). Joined Tea Party Express Bus Tour, Stayed in Spokane Afterwards - He joined the Tea Party Express bus tour (see August 28, 2009), and covered over 30 tea party rallies in a little over two weeks. Barstow realized, he says, that the Tea Party Express (TPE) was but one of many distinctive tea party organizations. TPE’s goal is to gain seats for Republicans in Congress, and the tour organizers “were not really representative of the tea party movement as a whole, which was very much a grassroots creation that was drawing in lots of newcomers who were extremely concerned about preserving their independence and not being co-opted.” Some tea party organizers agonized over whether to host the TPE tour in their towns. But, Barstow goes on to say, the bus tour itself was incidental to the final story. He was far more interested in the stories of ordinary Americans like Pam Stout, an interview subject who went from being completely uninvolved in politics to becoming president of her local tea party chapter. So many Americans’ lives have been impacted by the recession, Barstow says, and many of those people have turned to their local tea parties to try to get involved in a movement to express their frustrations and perhaps do something about the government that they blame for allowing the economy to fail. The other driving force behind the tea parties, he says, is the members’ overwhelming fear of “impending tyranny.” Most tea partiers fear that American democracy will disappear, perhaps during their own lifetimes, to be replaced by some form of dictatorship or “one-world government” (see February 4-8, 2010). After the TPE bus tour concluded, Barstow stayed in Spokane, Washington, for the month of October 2009, interviewing many tea partiers and affiliated people. He chose the area because of its history of anti-government activism. He says he wanted to cover not just formal tea party organizations, but other groups with connections to the tea parties, including the 9/12 movement (see March 13, 2009 and After), the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), the Campaign for Liberty, and groups with strong ties to white supremacist militia organizations. From time spent in and around Spokane, he learned that the area’s tea parties are quite disparate and factionalized, though “you can make too much of that. If you spend enough time talking to people in the movement, eventually you hear enough of the same kinds of ideas, the same kinds of concerns, and you begin to recognize what the ideology is, what the paradigm is that they’re operating in.… There’s a fear that both parties have been complicit in this giant charade that has done enormous damage to ordinary Americans. It’s very complex, and yet at the same time there is something coherent about it.” Increasing Militia Influence - Barstow says the influence of far-right, white supremacist militia groups on the tea party organizations in the Northwest and other areas is increasing. Even tea partiers who do not belong to or support militias often accept the idea of militias and civilian paramilitary training (see April 8, 2009, May 8-15, 2009, January 14, 2010, February 2010, July 23, 2010, August 24, 2010, August 24, 2010, and May 5, 2011). Understanding the Tea Parties - To understand the tea parties, Barstow says, one must read the literature that informs the movement. He recommends reading books such as W. Cleon Skousen’s The 5000-Year Leap, a radical reinterpretation of the US Constitution; Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island, a book purporting to prove the Federal Reserve is a fraudulent institution; and Atlas Shrugged, the novel by Ayn Rand that explicates her “objectivist” social philosophy. Barstow says the tea party movement is informed by “a robust intellectual subculture” that helps shape members’ world views. According to Barstow, the tea parties are not, as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has maintained, becoming the activist conservative wing of the Republican Party (see April 21, 2010), but something more. “They are seeking a bigger transformation than just nudging the Republican Party a little bit to the right,” Barstow says. “A lot of the coverage is about how these people want smaller government and less taxation. That’s true, and yet it doesn’t completely get what’s going on.” [Columbia Journalism Review, 2/18/2010]

Author Amity Shlaes is one of 13 people interviewed by the New York Times about their perceptions of the tea party movement. [Source: National Review]The New York Times, in light of a recent poll showing American tea party supporters to be whiter, wealthier, and more conservative than average Americans (see April 14, 2010), interviews a number of prominent historians, journalists, and political analysts about their views on the tea party. Tea Party Very Similar to Anti-Liberal Organizations of Generations Past - Rick Perlstein, the biographer of former president Richard Nixon and former Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), writes of his “frustration” at “watching the rise of the tea party movement,” calling it “ugly” and in opposition to “so many of the values I hold dear.” He notes the “overwhelming historical myopia” of the news media’s coverage of the tea party, saying that the current movement is comprised of “the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within US government” (see February 4-8, 2010, February 15, 2010, September 2010, and August 17, 2011). Perlstein quotes conservative activist Brent Bozell asking, “When was the last time you saw such a spontaneous eruption of conservative grass-roots anger, coast to coast?” and responds: “The answer, of course, is: in 1993. And 1977. And 1961. And so on. And so yet much of the commentariat takes Bozell at his word, reading what is happening as striking and new.” Perlstein writes that the parallels between the current tea party movement and the previous movements opposing the Roosevelt, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton administrations “are uncanny.… The only thing that changes is the name of the enemy within.” In 1963, accusations flew that President Kennedy was “in bed” with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to bring socialism to America; today, the accusations are that the “Muslim terrorist” President Obama wants to bring socialism to America, perhaps with the aid of Islamist terror groups. Perlstein says that in years past, the media was far more unflinching at labeling the reactionaries as “fringe” elements. “[B]ack then, they covered the story with much more moral courage and civic wisdom.” Now, Perlstein writes, the media fawns over tea party leaders and the right-wing commentators who promote them (see August 11, 2009). 'Sullen, Defensive Mobilization' of Wealthier Americans who Fear the Poor - Author Michael Lind, the policy director of the centrist New America Foundation, advises Republicans and Democrats both to “ignore this faux populist base of the GOP and focus instead on the genuine swing voters.” Tea partiers, Lind writes, are not “[p]itchfork-wielding populists,” but are closer to “the affluent members of the Liberty League who vilified President Roosevelt in the 1930s (see August 23, 1934 and After)—a sullen, defensive mobilization of the Have-Somes who dread the Have-Nots. The tea partiers put the ‘petty’ in petty bourgeoisie. They are disgruntled conservative Fox Republicans.” Tea Parties Focusing on Constitutional Issues - Author Steven F. Hayward, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, lauds the tea parties as primarily focused on economic and constitutional issues (see May 2010), and more supportive of gay rights, abortion rights, and limited gun restrictions than the media may admit. Hayward writes that he is surprised that most tea partiers are “more economically secure than the general population” and better-educated than the average American: “[T]he narrative that the tea partiers are a bunch of pitchfork populist rubes becomes harder to maintain.” Racism does not permeate the tea parties, Hayward argues (see February 27, 2009, April 2009, July 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 11, 2009, September 2009, September 14, 2009, October 15, 2009 and After, January 14, 2010, February 2010, March 20, 2010, March 25, 2010, March 26, 2010, May 14, 2010, July 13, 2010, July 14, 2010, July 15, 2010, July 17-18, 2010, August 6, 2010, August 24, 2010, August 24, 2010, September 11, 2010, September 12, 2010, October 10, 2010, October 19, 2010, April 15, 2011, April 16, 2011, May 5, 2011, July 29, 2011 and After, August 22-30, 2011, and December 10, 2011), “though there is some evidence of polarization that is a problem for the tea party as a movement.” Hayward opines that such racism that can be documented in tea party members “is likely an aspect of party politics today.” He also states that tea party supporters do not believe the “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama is not an American citizen any more than the average American, a statement at odds with many other analyses of tea party ideologies (see October 2008, January 8, 2009, June 4, 2009, February 4-8, 2010, February 15, 2010, September 2010, April 13-15, 2011, and July 1-2, 2011), even though the poll shows that only 41 percent of the tea party supporters believe that Obama is a “natural-born citizen.” The driving factor behind so many Americans with no previous history of political involvement is, he writes, the fact that most tea party members “are moderates who are simply shocked by Obama’s great leap forward in the size of government,” and he compares the tea parties to the third-party backers of presidential candidate H. Ross Perot in 1992. He concludes, “The real promise of the tea party movement is that it may lead to a reinvigoration of the idea of constitutional limits on government—an idea liberals may find quaint if not hopelessly obsolete.” Long-Discredited 'Radical Right' Views Propelling Tea Parties - Author and university professor Alan Wolfe, a self-described liberal, derides the tea parties as little more than a repackaged version of the “radical right” which has long been a part of America’s body politic. The tea party movement, Wolfe writes, has given “American intellectuals whose views have been out of fashion for some time” a new platform with which to express their ideas. The same ideas that drove the McCarthyite “Red scare” of the 1950s are driving the tea parties today, Wolfe writes, and points to the increasing involvement of organizations such as the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961) in the tea party movement (see July 22, 2007, August 4, 2008, October 10, 2008, April 13, 2009, April 19, 2010, and August 24, 2010). Like the people who support the JBS both now and in the 1950s, tea partiers are driven “not so much to their economic circumstances as to their status anxieties.” They fear the changing, increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan society around them, and dislike, or sometimes even hate, the seeming “encroachment” of minorities and lower-class Americans on their lives. Wolfe says that the idea that tea party members do not embrace racist values any more than other Americans is specious; their poll responses can be explained, he writes, by noting that “people who respond to them have learned to hide their true feelings.” He concludes: “At the risk of sounding condescending, these people have lost all perspective. They know how to kvetch. They know nothing about what makes their country great. Instead of watching Glenn Beck, I would urge them to learn more about their country’s history—or to go and see a shrink.” Using Coded Appeals to Race - Law professor Paul Butler writes that while most tea partiers are “more uber-Republicans than Klansmen,” the organizations are very good at using racist “code words” to appeal to racist whites while maintaining plausible deniability about their inherent appeal to racist politics. “The tea party is smart enough not to frame its agenda around white supremacy, but the code words are there,” he writes “[T]he most virulent anti-Obama force in the country is smart enough not to frame its agenda around white supremacy—at least not explicitly.” While most tea partiers were clever enough not to indicate that they were bluntly racist in the poll results, the fact that a strong majority of them “believe that too much has been made of the problems that African-Americans face, and that the administration favors blacks over whites,” is quite telling, Butler writes. “Overwhelmingly they believe that Barack Obama doesn’t share the needs and problems of people like them, or the values of ‘most Americans.’ These code words have been around long enough, everybody gets them.” Poll Does Not Support Idea that Tea Partiers Embrace Bigotry - Author and columnist Amity Shlaes writes that the poll numbers do not support the “media stereotype” that tea party supporters “are racist or intolerant. The media depicts tea partiers as bigots who look down on minorities, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.” Similarly, she argues, the poll results do not support the idea that tea party supporters believe Obama is a Muslim any more than average Americans do. As the tea party organizers claim, the movement is largely about economics, Shales writes. Fear of Loss of Control - History professor and author Alan Brinkley calls the tea party “the party of me,” and compares its members demographically to the Americans who supported the McCarthyite “Red scare” inquisitions and the Clinton-era Whitewater investigations—predominantly white males, significantly wealthier than the average American, far more conservative than the mainstream, and fearful of the prospect that conservative white males might not continue to exert control over American society. “[W]hat seems to motivate them the most is a fear of a reduction in their own status—economically and socially,” Brinkley writes. As for their economic worries, he writes, “[T]heir concern is not the state of the economy as a whole, but their own economic conditions.” Brinkley concludes: “The real issue, I believe, is a sense among white males that they are somehow being displaced, that the country is no longer ‘theirs,’ that minorities and immigrants are becoming more and more powerful within society. And, of course, they are right about that. They just fear it more than many other Americans.” Unrealistic Belief that Government Can Exist without Taxation - Author and former political science professor Lorenzo Morris writes that the tea party’s position on taxes is extremist: “The tea party supporters seem to think that government can exist without taxes.” The American experiment with the Articles of Confederation, which provided no real tax income at all, proves that idea to be wrong, Morris writes, but “[w]ith enough time and historical romanticism, however, bad ideas come back around.” He writes that the current appearance of the tea parties has become less “vitriolic and menacing” than their image from the summer of 2009, when their vociferous and sometimes-violent protesting of health care reform painted them as frightening and bigoted (see July 23, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 28, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6-7, 2009, August 6-8, 2009, August 7, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 10, 2009, August 10, 2009, and August 11, 2009). The tea parties have begun to win the approval of right-wing Republican figures, including many of those who intend a presidential run in 2012. But, he concludes, their rigid disapproval of taxes as a concept, and taxation as a reality, means that they will inevitably “repeat the folly of those early Americans who thought there could be government with no taxes.” Anger without Willingness to Make Real Change - Law professor Susan Estrich notes that the poll indicates a large reservoir of approval for former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK), the 2008 vice-presidential nominee for the Republican Party, but a strong doubt that she is competent to lead the nation. “Tea party types may be mad,” Estrich writes, “but they aren’t buying President Palin. And if they aren’t, who would?” Estrich goes on to note that tea party supporters, “like most of us… want to have it both ways: they want their Social Security and smaller government, want major cuts but not in Medicare, which is a little like having your cake and eating it, too. If you want to really reduce the size of government, that means cutting defense and entitlements. If you’re not willing to do that, what you get is big talk and no action, which is ultimately a recipe for anger.” She concludes by calling the racial element “lurking in the polls” “troubling.” Motivated by Racial Concerns - Author and Democratic activist Bob Moser writes of his familiarity with tea parties in Texas, “where the movement has flared up hotter than just about anywhere else,” and his lack of surprise at the demographics: white, conservative, male, and relatively affluent. The concern about the nation’s economic tribulations, and the anger directed at Obama, is understandable, he writes. However, “[w]hat strikes me is how often America’s great and terrible obsession, race, slithers around the poll numbers.” The poll numbers may not directly bear out the racism and bigotry that exists in the ranks of the tea partiers, Moser writes, “[b]ut it’s impossible to shrug off the collective impressions left by the data. Why, exactly, do 73 percent of tea partiers say that the president does not understand ‘the needs and problems of people like yourself’?” The movement works hard to marginalize Americans who disagree with them, particularly Obama, as un-American, not a member of “we the people.” Moser notes that almost three-quarters of the tea party supporters “say that black and white people have an ‘equal’ chance of ‘getting ahead in today’s society.’ If that’s not colorblindness, it’s certainly some kind of blindness.” Moser concludes by writing that the tea party movement is achieving both goals set by “its corporate Republican conjurers,” both “becoming the political expression of a white-resistance movement being spurred by anxieties over the economy, the black ‘socialist’ president, and the coming end of majority-white America… [and] leaning, at least in 2010, strongly Republican in attitude.” Healthy Expression of Populism - Political analyst David Gergen writes that the perception of the tea parties as angry, bitter, and divisive is untrue. He describes the latest rally he attended as “festive and friendly.” While many protest higher taxes and bigger government, Gergen writes, their claims that opposing Obama does not entail a racist viewpoint are true. “[M]any feel stung by what they see as misrepresentations in the press,” he writes. Gergen compares the 2010 tea partiers to the Ross Perot voters of 1992: “Those who supported Mr. Perot were mostly white, a little better educated than the general population and much more concerned about government deficits than government peeking into bedrooms. They were also more from the West and South but had pockets of support scattered around the country.” He notes that 18 percent of Americans identify themselves as tea party supporters; in 1992, 19 percent of voters cast their votes for Perot. He calls them a healthy expression of American populism and concludes: “Many of these tea partiers are fearful of how the country is changing. Some circles look down upon them; it would be far wiser to listen, understand and find ways to heal.” Heralding GOP Success for 2010, Problems Farther On - Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center and a political polls expert, says the poll numbers “augur well for the Republicans in November’s midterm elections: the politically energized supra conservatives—the 1 in 5 who are universally disaffected with national conditions, and with Barack Obama and with his policies—are likely to be a strong advantage in the midterms, where typically fewer than 4 of 10 eligible citizens vote.” The Republicans’ biggest challenge is to keep the tea party supporters’ votes while simultaneously attracting independents and moderates. And a move by the GOP to the right, to further embrace the tea partiers, “may not bode well for the party in the longer run, given the new primacy of independent voters, a power that was on full display in 2008.” Moreover, the tea parties may well co-opt the GOP, going from “the tail that wags the dog” to becoming “the dog itself.” Kohut writes: “Looking ahead, our polling suggests that the Republican party needs unifying themes and leadership. A tea party-led GOP may not be the prescription for that.” Economic Concerns Drive Tea Party Success - Political consultant Douglas Schoen says the fact that almost 1 in 5 Americans support the tea party “extraordinary, given that the movement is not active in half of America and that its name recognition is not universal.” Schoen gives no credence to “what appear to be the class-based or race-based attitudes of the tea party movement,” and writes that the movement is instead propelled by economic concerns. Schoen says that statistics aside, he believes the tea party movement to be far more diverse than the polls indicate (see September 2010). Almost half its supporters identify themselves as non-Republicans, and a quarter of them claim to have voted for Obama in 2008, he says. [New York Times, 4/15/2010]

This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is co-sponsored by the far-right, openly racist John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011). CPAC spokesman Ian Walters says this is the first time the JBS has sponsored the conference. In the 1960s, influential conservative pundit William F. Buckley denounced the society and its founder Robert Welch as “idiotic” and “paranoid.” Buckley’s condemnation effectively exiled the group from mainstream conservatism for half a century. Welch had accused then-President Dwight Eisenhower of being a “conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy” and said the government was “under operational control of the Communist Party.” Buckley argued that such paranoid rantings had no place in the conservative movement or the Republican Party. Lisa Depasquale, CPAC’s director for the American Conservative Union, which runs the conference, explains why the JBS is now a sponsor, saying: “They’re a conservative organization. Beyond that I have no comment.” [ABC News, 4/19/2010]

William F. Jasper. [Source: John Birch Society]William F. Jasper, a senior member of the anti-Communist, implicitly racist John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) and the senior editor of its New American magazine, protests that the “left-wing media” are attempting to use the arrests of nine far-right militia members in the Midwest (see March 27-30, 2010) “to broadly smear all political conservatives, constitutionalists, tea party activists, and opponents of President Obama’s health care as ‘extremist’ and ‘anti-government.’” Jasper derides the media’s reliance on experts from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC—see March 2, 2010) for understanding and analysis of the Michigan Hutaree and other militia groups. “[P]redictably,” he writes, “the SPLC has been only too ready to spin the story as proof of their contention that the greatest danger to our republic is ‘anti-government’ extremism by ‘right-wing’ organizations the SPLC likes to identify as ‘hate groups.’” Jasper says that groups like the JBS and the Hutaree are “falsely label[ed] as being racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-government, anti-immigrant, nativist, extremist, hate-promoting, and intolerant.” He writes that the SPLC routinely conflates right-wing “constitutionalist” or “patriot” groups with “genuine hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, or the Nazi Party” in an attempt “to smear and discredit them by false association.” He then attacks the SPLC as “a principal front for the militant homosexual lobby” and a strong opponent of the “Christian Right,” accusing it of “smear[ing] such respected Christian and pro-family organizations as Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, the late Rev. D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries/Center for Reclaiming America, and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America, as well as the Alliance Defense Fund, the American Family Association, the Chalcedon Foundation, American Vision, the Christian Action Network, the Family Research Council, Summit Ministries, and the Traditional Values Coalition.” He quotes right-wing attorney Matt Barber, the director of Liberty Counsel, as calling the SPLC a “bully” organization, and cites Barber as saying that a citation by the SPLC “confers a badge of honor upon every legitimate Christian and conservative organization it so disingenuously mislabels ‘hate group.’ It’s a tacit admission by the SPLC that these groups represent a political threat; that their activities undermine the SPLC’s not-so-thinly-veiled, left-wing agenda.” And he quotes far-left columnist Alexander Cockburn, an avowed Marxist, as labeling the SPLC a “hatemongering” organization. In truth, Jasper claims, it is the SPLC and not the groups it covers that is a true “hate group” responsible for police and other law enforcement officials unfairly pursuing and even endangering what he calls innocent citizens and organizations exercising their constitutional rights to protest against their government. Jasper takes particular umbrage at a Wisconsin news report that cited the SPLC’s identification of a JBS chapter in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, as a “patriot” group. The news report quoted SPLC official Heidi Beirich as calling the JBS “one of the number one organizations that provide the conspiracy theories that fuel the anti-government world.” He also notes that the news report quoted JBS chief Arthur Thompson as admitting that while many militia groups rely on JBS literature and Web sites for their information, “that doesn’t mean we support their policies of how they want to implement what they believe in. We believe in a lot of things but we don’t believe in coercion or violence to promote what we believe in.” The JBS, Jasper writes, has “promot[ed] freedom” for over 50 years, and calls it “a patriotic, educational organization dedicated to restoring and preserving limited, constitutional government, free enterprise, and Christian-style civilization.” The JBS “has always opposed racism, anti-Semitism, communism, socialism, fascism, and Nazism,” Jasper concludes, though he acknowledges that his claim “has not stopped liberal-left critics from falsely accusing the Society of these things. In so doing these critics have adopted the tactics developed by the Communist Party of smearing their opponents rather than honestly debating them on the issues.” [John Birch Society, 6/3/2008; New American, 4/26/2010]

Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights logo. [Source: IREHR / Facebook]The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR) issues a comprehensive, multi-part report on the American “tea party” movement. The report is written by IREHR vice president Devin Burghart and IREHR president Leonard Zeskind, both accomplished authors and researchers. The report examines six national organizational networks which Burghart and Zeskind say are “at the core of the tea party movement.” These six include: the FreedomWorks Tea Party; the 1776 Tea Party (“TeaParty.org”); Tea Party Nation; Tea Party Patriots; ResistNet; and the Tea Party Express. The report examines their origins, structures, leadership, policies, funding, membership, and relations with one another. [Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 8/24/2010]Data Collection Methodology - The authors provide details of their data collection methodology in a separate section of the report. [Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 10/19/2010]Racism, Anti-Semitism Rampant in Many (Not All) Tea Party Organizations - The report explicitly notes that “[i]t would be a mistake to claim that all tea partiers are nativist vigilantes or racists of one stripe or another.” It shows that while tea party organizations, and many media outlets, paint tea partiers as concentrated primarily on “budget deficits, taxes, and the power of the federal government,” in reality many tea party organizations are very focused on racial, nationalist, and other social issues (see January 14, 2010). The report finds: “In these ranks, an abiding obsession with Barack Obama’s birth certificate (see June 13, 2008) is often a stand-in for the belief that the first black president of the United States is not a ‘real American.’ Rather than strict adherence to the Constitution, many tea partiers are challenging the provision for birthright citizenship found in the 14th Amendment.” Many (not all) tea party organizations open their ranks “to anti-Semites, racists, and bigots,” the report finds, and in many of those organizations, the racists and bigots have leadership positions. And, it finds, white supremacist organizations routinely attend and even present at tea party rallies, “looking for potential recruits and hoping to push these (white) protesters towards a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy.” The report notes that former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke is trying to find money and support among tea party organizations to launch a 2012 bid for the Republican presidential nomination. The leaders of the 1776 Tea Party organization “were imported directly from the anti-immigrant vigilante organization, the Minuteman Project,” the report notes. Tea Party Nation has attracted a large contingent of so-called “birthers,” Christian nationalists, and nativists, many of whom display openly racist sentiments; some other tea party organizations have now distanced themselves from that particular group. ResistNet and Tea Party Patriots, the two largest “umbrella” organizations or networks, are also rife with anti-immigrant nativists and racists; the Tea Party Patriots have openly embraced the idea of the repeal of the 17th Amendment (see April 8, 2010). At least one group, the Washington DC-based FreedomWorks Tea Party, has made some efforts to focus its actions solely on economic issues and eschew social or religious issues; those efforts have largely failed. There is a large and disparate “schema” of racist organizations and belief systems in America, the report notes, from Nazi sympathizers to “America-first isolationists,” “scientific” racists, nativists, “paleoconservatives,” and others. Generally, the more mainstream and less extremist racist movements and persons gravitate to tea party organizations. “[T]he white nationalist movement is divided between two strategic orientations: the go-it-alone vanguardists and the mainstreamers who seek to win a majority following among white people. It is decidedly the mainstreamers, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens… who seek to influence and recruit among the tea partiers.” The same can be said of militia groups: the more mainstream of these organizations are the ones taking part in, and recruiting at, tea party events. The two—racist and militia groups—have, of course, a heavy overlap in membership and belief structures. Tea party leaders and members tend to strongly dispute evidence that their fellows espouse racist beliefs. [Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 8/24/2010; Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 10/19/2010]Economic Beliefs Tied to Anger at Immigrants, 'Undeserving Poor' - The tea parties are most often characterized as anti-tax economic conservatives who oppose government spending; however, the report finds, “there is no observable statistical link between tea party membership and unemployment levels.… And their storied opposition to political and social elites turns out to be predicated on an antagonism to federal assistance to those deemed the ‘undeserving poor.’” Many tea party members and organizations, including some of the movement’s most visible political leaders, are openly anti-immigrant. The House’s Tea Party Caucus, led by Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), has a significant overlap with the members of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, led by tea party supporter Brian Bilbray (R-CA). The Immigration Reform Caucus has introduced legislation that would end the Constitution’s principle of “birthright citizenship.” The racist and anti-immigrant themes at play in many tea party organizations have dovetailed in these organizations’ attacks on President Obama as being a “non-American.” The report observes: “The permutations go on from there: Islamic terrorist, socialist, African witch doctor, lying African, etc. If he is not properly American, then he becomes the ‘other’ that is not ‘us.’ Five of the six national factions have these ‘birthers’ in their leadership; the only exception being FreedomWorks.” 'Nationalism' of Tea Parties - Most tea party organizations hark back to the Revolutionary War era and the Founding Fathers as their forebears, sometimes even dressing in 18th-century costumes, waving the Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and claiming that the US Constitution as written should be the touchstone of all legislative policies. However, the report notes that their “American nationalism” is hardly inclusive: “[T]heirs is an American nationalism that does not always include all Americans. It is a nationalism that excludes those deemed not to be ‘real Americans’; including the native-born children of undocumented immigrants (often despised as ‘anchor babies’), socialists, Moslems, and those not deemed to fit within a ‘Christian nation.’” The report connects the tea parties’ concept of nationalism (see October 19, 2010) back to the “America First” ideology of Father Charles Coughlin, a vocal anti-Semite and supporter of Nazism (see October 3, 1926 - 1942). The report notes: “As the Confederate battle flags, witch doctor caricatures, and demeaning discourse suggest, a bright white line of racism threads through this nationalism. Yet, it is not a full-fledged variety of white nationalism. It is as inchoate as it is super-patriotic. It is possibly an embryo of what it might yet become.” Multi-Million Dollar Complex Heavily Funded by Right-Wing Foundations - The tea party movement presents itself as a loose confederation of ground-up, grassroots groups and organizations put together by principled citizens driven by their political and social concerns. However, the reality is that many tea party organizations are for-profit corporations and/or political action committees, with some equally well-funded non-profit corporations included in the mix. Collectively, they have succeeded at trumping the Democrats’ advantage in Web-based mobilization and fundraising. Resurrection of 'Ultra-Conservative Wing of American Political Life' - The report finds that the tea party organizations “have resuscitated the ultra-conservative wing of American political life, created a stiff pole of opinion within Republican Party ranks, and they have had a devastating impact on thoughtful policy making for the common good, both at the local and state as well as at the federal levels.” The report finds: “The tea party movement has unleashed a still inchoate political movement by angry middle class (overwhelmingly) white people who believe their country, their nation, has been taken from them. And they want it back.” Whom they apparently “want it back” from is from non-white Americans. The report notes that the tea party slogan, “Take It Back, Take Your Country Back” is “an explicitly nationalist refrain. It is sometimes coupled with the assertion that there are ‘real Americans,’ as opposed to others who they believe are driving the country into a socialist ditch.” Three Levels of Structure - As with most entities of this nature, there are three fundamental levels to the “tea party structure.” Some 16 to 18 percent of Americans say they have some sympathy with tea party ideals—these citizens, numbering in the tens of millions, form the outer ring of the structure. The next ring as an ill-defined group of perhaps two million activists who go to meetings and rallies, and buy literature. The core is composed of some 250,000 heavily involved members who take part in the Web-directed activities of the tea party organizations. The report focuses on this group as the hub of what it calls “tea party nationalists.” As time goes on, the tea parties continue to add members to their ranks. The Tea Party Patriots and ResistNet are, at this time, experiencing the fastest rate of growth; the report notes, “This would tend to indicate a larger movement less susceptible to central control, and more likely to attract racist and nativist elements at the local level.” The tea parties as a whole will continue to wield their influence on American political and social debates, though the tea parties may begin to splinter as some members move into the more structured Republican Party apparatus and others move towards the more extremist white nationalist organizations. The report does not include local groups not affiliated with one or the other of the national networks, and the ancillary organizations that have worked alongside the tea parties since their inception. The report notes some of these ancillary organizations as Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty (see August 4, 2008), Americans for Prosperity (see Late 2004), the National Precinct Alliance, and the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011). The report also notes the existence of the “9-12 movement” (see March 13, 2009 and After), but does not count that as a separate network, and goes on to note that after the 2009 9-12 rally in Washington (see September 12, 2009), many 9-12 groups joined a tea party organization. [Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 8/24/2010]Response - Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, responds to the release of the IREHR report by saying: “Here we go again. This is typical of this liberal group’s smear tactics.” Phillips does not cite examples of the report’s “smear tactics.” [Kansas City Star, 10/19/2010]

Mother Jones columnist Kevin Drum compares the “tea party” movement to earlier organizations, each formed, he writes, to oppose Democratic presidencies. “[T]oo many observers mistakenly react to the tea party as if it’s brand new, an organic and spontaneous response to something unique in the current political climate,” he writes. “But it’s not. It’s not a response to the recession or to health care reform or to some kind of spectacular new liberal overreach. It’s what happens whenever a Democrat takes over the White House. When FDR was in office in the 1930s, conservative zealotry coalesced in the Liberty League (see August 23, 1934 and After). When JFK won the presidency in the ‘60s, the John Birch Society flourished (see November 1963). When Bill Clinton ended the Reagan Revolution in the ‘90s, talk radio erupted with the conspiracy theories of the Arkansas Project. And today, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, it’s the tea party’s turn.” While differences between the various groups are substantive, Drum writes, the similarities are overwhelming. Drum notes that industrialist Fred Koch, an early backer of the Birchers (see 1940 and After), gave way to his sons, David and Charles Koch, who helped launch the organization that would become FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, both of which are major funders and organizers of the tea party movement (see 1979-1980 and 1984 and After). Tea partiers rely on a 50-year-old radical reinterpretation of the Constitution, W. Cleon Skousen’s The 5000 Year Leap; Skousen’s anti-Communist polemics were popular with the Birchers. And Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), believed that the 17th Amendment, which affirms the direct election of US senators, was what Drum calls “a poisonous concentration of power in the federal government.” Tea partiers and Fox News hosts hawk this same theory today (see October 16, 2009, April 8, 2010, and June 11, 2010). Drum writes that, far from being motivated by personal economic hardship (tea party supporters tend to be more affluent and less affected by the economic downturn than the average American—see April 14, 2010) or even because of a dislike of President Obama because of his race, the tea party exists because “[e]ver since the 1930s, something very much like the tea party movement has fluoresced every time a Democrat wins the presidency, and the nature of the fluorescence always follows many of the same broad contours: a reverence for the Constitution, a supposedly spontaneous uprising of formerly nonpolitical middle-class activists, a preoccupation with socialism and the expanding tyranny of big government, a bitterness toward an underclass viewed as unwilling to work, and a weakness for outlandish conspiracy theories.” Constitutional 'Purity' - One similarity is the focus of each group on what they term the “purity” or “sanctity” of the US Constitution, even as they apply their sometimes-radical reinterpretations of constitutional mandates. “The Liberty Leaguers… spoke of it with ‘worshipful intensity,’” Drum writes. “The John Birch Society—which is enjoying a renaissance of sorts today (see July 22, 2007, August 4, 2008, October 10, 2008, April 13, 2009, April 19, 2010, and August 24, 2010)—says of itself, ‘From its earliest days the John Birch Society has emphasized the importance of the Constitution for securing our freedom.’ And… study groups dedicated to the Constitution have mushroomed among tea partiers” (see May 2010). Fear of 'Creeping Socialism' and Tyranny - Drum writes: “Other shared tropes include a fear of ‘losing the country we grew up in,’ an obsession with ‘parasites’ who are leeching off of hardworking Americans, and—even though they’ve always received copious assistance from business interests and political operatives—a myth that the movement is composed entirely of fed-up grassroots amateurs” (see 1984 and After, Late 2004, January 2009 and After, February 17, 2009, February 19, 2009 and After, March 13, 2009 and After, April 14, 2009, April 15, 2009, May 29, 2009, July 27, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, July 3-4, 2010, and August 30, 2010). Above all, though, is the recurring theme of “creeping socialism and a federal government that’s destroying our freedoms.” The American Liberty League fought to stop the Roosevelt administration from establishing Social Security, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and what Drum calls an “alphabet soup of new regulatory agencies.” In the 1960s, the John Birch Society (JBS) felt the government was being overrun by Communism and “collectivism.” Drum notes that JBS founder Robert Welch’s mantra, “Less government and more responsibility,” echoes central tenets of tea party beliefs. In the 1990s, then-Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA) became House Speaker in large part because of his opposition to the Clinton administration and his leadership in the right’s battle to defund federal social-net programs. Today, tea partiers echo the JBS in their insistence that Obama is a closet Marxist or socialist, and echo fears from earlier groups that Obama, the Democrat, intends to turn American democracy into a tyranny. Conspiracy Theories - Drum echoes conservative writer Jonathan Kay by noting the tea partiers’ “insatiable appetite for conspiracy theories” (see February 4-8, 2010). Welch argued that the federal government was bowing to Communist manipulation by fluoridating the water supply (see 1945 and After), but more importantly, promoted the idea that a mysterious group of “insiders” had been running the world since at least 1776, when the Illuminati took over most European governments. The “insiders” continued their influence, Welch avowed, through the years, taking over France after the French Revolution, Russia and other nations after the advent of Communism, and continued to exercise control through such organs as the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. The same groups are at the center of many conspiracy theories embraced by numerous tea partiers. Drum points out the fondness of the “anti-Clinton zealots” for their “colorful and ever-growing bestiary of shadowy plots,” most surrounding their belief that Clinton was a rapist, a murderer, and a drug peddler. Similar conspiracy theories were promulgated by the JBS about John Kennedy. “Today’s conspiracy theories are different in detail but no less wacky—and no less widespread,” Drum writes. The “birther” conspiracy theory, which holds that Obama is not a natural-born citizen, is quite popular with tea party supporters, and many more believe that Obama intends to place conservatives such as themselves in internment camps, a theory peddled by the JBS in the early 1960s. And many believe that ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the now-defunct community service organization, somehow took control of the Democratic Party, destroyed banks by forcing them to make loans to indigent minorities, crashed the economy, and installed Obama into power. Effectiveness Improving over Time - Drum writes that each iteration of this right-wing phenomenon is more successful than the last. The Liberty League made no impact whatsoever on President Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election attempt. In 1964, the JBS succeeded in helping right-wing libertarian candidate Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) win the Republican presidential nomination. In the 1990s, Gingrich rode the wave of far-right activism to become speaker of the House, and the activism culminated in the impeachment of President Clinton and the election of President George W. Bush. Drum predicts that the latest wave, the tea party movement, will for all intents and purposes take over the Republican Party. In each iteration, moderate Republicans resisted the wave of right-wing change, but, Drum believes, not enough moderate Republicans exist in any position of power to resist the tea party transformation. The GOP has been shifting ever rightward since the 1970s, Drum notes, and the tea party movement has profited from a transformed media environment, where it can present its ideology almost nonstop on Fox News and rely on social media such as Facebook to connect with new recruits. Drum calls the paradigm shift “the mainstreaming of extremism.” In 1961, Time magazine disparaged the JBS as “tiresome” (see March 10, 1961); in 2009, it hailed Fox News personality Glenn Beck as “gifted.” Moderates have virtually no chance in today’s environment of pushing back against the tea party’s rightward surge. “Unlike the Birchers, or even the Clinton conspiracy theorists, the tea partiers aren’t a fringe part of the conservative movement,” Drum writes. “They are the conservative movement.” Drum believes that even with all the tea party’s current success, it will eventually burn itself out, “while its broader identity becomes subsumed by a Republican Party that’s been headed down the path of ever less-tolerant conservatism for decades. In that sense, the tea party movement is merely an unusually flamboyant symptom of an illness that’s been breeding for a long time.” [Mother Jones, 9/2010]

Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, running for the US Senate against Harry Reid (D-NV), urges her supporters in Utah to “take out” Reid. In January, Angle told a conservative radio host that someone should “take him [Reid] out” by “Second Amendment remedies,” which most observers took to mean by the use of firearms (see January 2010). Angle later withdrew her statement and said she meant “take him out of office” (see June 30, 2010). She said she had “changed her rhetoric” and would not use the term again. Angle restates her comment to say she wants to “defeat” Reid in the November election: “In Nevada, we understand we have the opportunity to take out—to defeat,” she says, drawing laughter. “I really have had to find a whole new vocabulary since the primaries.… The first thing we need to do is to defeat Harry Reid. That defeat will send a shock wave through Congress. It will let them know that this train is coming. They can either get on board or get run over by it.” Angle’s speech is part of a larger conference called “Utah United” that draws some 400 conservatives from Utah and the surrounding area, many of whom are self-described “tea party” members. The conference is sponsored by, among others: the far-right extremist John Birch Society (see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), the Eagle Forum, the National Center for Constitutional Studies, and the Utah Farm Bureau. Angle is one of several hard-right GOP candidates at the conference. She has the support of the national Tea Party Express, Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, and the Club for Growth, a conservative group credited with aiding the ouster of incumbent US Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) in last spring’s GOP primary. (Last summer, Angle said that Bennett had “outlived his usefulness” to the Republican Party.) Reid campaign spokesman Jon Summers says that Angle is “trolling for support anywhere she can get it because she’s not getting it from Nevadans. While she’s seeking every out-of-state endorsement she can get, Senator Reid has the support of more than 200 Nevada Republican leaders as well as law enforcement and business leaders, just to name a few. Nevadans are rejecting Sharron Angle because of her extreme agenda to kill Social Security, privatize the Veterans Administration, and ship 77,000 tons of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, just outside of Las Vegas.” Of Angle’s urging that someone “take out” Reid, Angle campaign spokeswoman Lee Rech says the statement “was just a slip.” Angle meant that she hoped to “retire” Reid from the Senate. [Salt Lake Tribune, 9/18/2010; Huffington Post, 9/19/2010]

Glenn Beck uses a chalkboard to connect billionaire George Soros to numerous events and organizations. [Source: Open Salon (.com)]Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck spends three broadcast days lambasting Jewish billionaire George Soros, whom Beck blames for single-handedly funding America’s left-wing, liberal, and progressive causes. Beck calls Soros a “puppet master” responsible for spreading political and economic chaos throughout the world. Soros was a teenager in Hungary when the Nazis invaded that country; Soros spent a brief period of time hiding with a non-Jewish Hungarian family whose father handed out deportation notices to Hungarian Jews. Soros has written of this incident in his biography; Beck uses that fact to label Soros as a Nazi collaborator. [Salon, 11/11/2010; Atlantic Wire, 11/12/2010; Cenk Uygur, 11/13/2010] Beck tells his audience that Soros “used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here’s a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps. And I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he’s 14 years old. He was surviving. So I’m not making a judgment. That’s between him and God. As a 14-year-old boy, I don’t know what you would do. I don’t know what you would do. But you would think that there would be some remorse as an 80-year-old man or a 40-year-old man or a 20-year-old man, when it was all over, you would do some soul searching and say: ‘What did I do? What did I do?’” On his radio show, Beck goes farther, accusing Soros of helping “send the Jews” to “death camps” during the Holocaust. Beck goes on to add that Soros “is not a fan of the state of Israel. George Soros is—many people would call him an anti-Semite. I will not. I don’t know enough about all of his positions on Jews. I know his mother, in George Soros’s own words, his mother was an anti-Semite. And so he just has this weird, weird world view. He’s also an atheist.” [The Jewish Week, 11/11/2010; Media Matters, 11/11/2010] Beck goes on to accuse Soros of deliberately manipulating the global economy to ensure its collapse and says Soros wants to rule the world like a god: “Soros has admitted in the past he doesn’t believe in God, but that’s perhaps because he thinks he is.” [Daily Beast, 11/11/2010] “Eighty years ago, George Soros was born,” Beck says. “Little did the world know then, economies would collapse, currencies would become worthless, elections would be stolen, regimes would fall. And one billionaire would find himself coincidentally at the center of it all.” [Salon, 11/9/2010] Salon’s Alex Pareene writes: “I don’t think people who read secondhand accounts of the specials—or even those who read the transcripts—can grasp how weird and shameless the entire spectacle was. There were puppets strewn about the set. The camera always watches Beck watching whatever we’re supposed to be watching. Beck blatantly flirted with classic anti-Semitic tropes, knowing he’d be called on it but confident his friends would have his back. His taunting response to criticism: If he’s a lying anti-Semite, why would Rupert Murdoch [the owner of News Corp., which owns Fox News] allow him on the air?” [Salon, 11/13/2010]Beck: Soros Attempting to Destroy Global Economy - Jewish author and columnist Michelle Goldberg calls Beck’s “tirade” against Soros “a new low on American television.” She writes: “The program… was a symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles. Nothing like it has ever been on American television before.” Goldberg writes: “Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion [an infamous anti-Semitic screed]. He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a ‘shadow government’ that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. [President] Obama is his ‘puppet,’ Beck says. Soros has even ‘infiltrated the churches.’ He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain. ‘Four times before,’ Beck warned. ‘We’ll be number five.’” Beck is misrepresenting Soros’s support for organizations that have helped to overthrow Communist regimes in former Soviet Union nations. Goldberg writes: “Beck’s implication is that there was something sinister in Soros’ support for anti-communist civil society organizations in the former Soviet Union. Further, he sees such support as evidence that Soros will engineer a Communist coup here in the United States. This kind of thinking only makes sense within the conspiratorial mind-set of classic anti-Semitism, in which Jews threaten all governments equally. And as a wealthy Jew with a distinct Eastern European accent, Soros is a perfect target for such theories.” [Daily Beast, 11/11/2010] Ron Chusid, writing for the blog Liberal Values, notes: “Glenn Beck often repeats conspiracy theories from the Birchers [meaning the John Birch Society—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011 ] and other far right wing groups. That made it inevitable that he would wander into repeating anti-Semitic memes which have historically been common on the far right.” [Ron Chusid, 11/11/2010] “How much worse can it get when one links the other to anti-Semitism and Nazism?” asks Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor. “And how much weirder can it get when the target of that charge escaped the Holocaust as a young Jewish teenager?” [Christian Science Monitor, 11/13/2010]Beck Denies Anti-Semitism - Beck denies any anti-Semitism on his part. Instead, Beck accuses Soros of being anti-Semitic, and uses his time of hiding with the Hungarian family as “proof” of his hatred of Jews, and his “collaboration” with Nazis. [Daily Beast, 11/11/2010] “I’m going to concentrate on the fact that I think the lesson he learned in that horrific year of 1944 is if you hide your true identity you can gain power, you can survive,” Beck says. “And those who are seen as disadvantaged or handicapped and don’t hide their identity, well, they don’t survive.” The accusations of Soros being a “collaborator” actually began in 1998, after Soros discussed his successful escape from Nazi persecution on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Although the accusations were quickly proven false, right-wing opponents of Soros have continued to air them in an attempt to discredit the billionaire (see August 8, 2006 and February 2007). [Media Matters, 11/11/2010]Jewish Organizations Condemn Beck - Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, and the Jewish Funds for Justice call Beck’s accusations “monstrous” and “horrific.” However, Fox News defends Beck’s comments (see November 9-11, 2010 and After).

The John Birch Society booth displays a banner at the ‘Freedom Rally’ before the debate. [Source: Think Progress]Several prospective contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 participate in a debate in Greenville, South Carolina. The debate is presaged by a “Freedom Rally,” co-sponsored by local tea party groups, the local chapter of the far-right, implicitly racist John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), and a far-right militia organization, the Oath Keepers (see March 9, 2009). The rally features speakers such as Judge Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who lost his job after refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building, and Governor Nikki Haley (R-SC). “The change we’ve done in South Carolina can be done across the country,” Haley tells a crowd of some 200 members. “We need to change the person in the White House.” Other speakers talk about issues such as defending traditional marriage and making gold and silver legal tender in South Carolina. The JBS has been considered so extreme that until 2010, mainstream Republicans refused to countenance its involvement in their political events and campaigns (see April 19, 2010). Former Governor Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), US Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), former Governor Gary Johnson (R-NM), and former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and radio talk show host Herman Cain take part in the debate. Paul and Johnson are libertarians; during the debate, Paul argues for the legalization of heroin, Johnson calls for the legalization of marijuana, and both call for the US to end its military involvement in Afghanistan. [Fox News, 5/5/2011; Think Progress, 5/5/2011; Washington Post, 5/5/2011] Many credit Paul with bringing the JBS back into “favor” with the Republican Party (see July 22, 2007 and August 4, 2008). Fox News host Glenn Beck has also praised the JBS in his broadcasts (see November 9-11, 2010 and After).

A group of tea party-affiliated organizations, including the lobbying group Americans for Prosperity (see Late 2004), the Tea Party Patriots, the Heritage Foundation, the Buckeye Foundation, American Majority, and the far-right, extremst John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011), hosts a two-day event called the “We the People Convention.” The event is designed to help raise money and awareness for Republican political candidates, in part through the auspices of the Ohio Citizens PAC. Some 88 area tea party groups in the Ohio Liberty Council are the local sponsors; the attendance is estimated at around 300 people. According to the organization’s Web site, “The purpose of the convention is to provide educational programs that will help all citizens participate in self governance as provided by the US and Ohio Constitutions by participating in the governance of their township, village, municipality, state, and country.” The convention includes “breakout sessions” that give information on “start[ing] your own Patriot group in your home town, or strengthen[ing] your existing group.” According to a report by the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights’s Devin Burghart, the workshops advocate the dismantling of public education, Social Security, and Medicaid; the banning of labor unions; and voter suppression efforts against non-white voters. Burghart writes, “A hard look at this conference provides an invaluable window on the way the tea party movement works against even the most minimal efforts to promote the common good.” Many of the workshop presenters engage in what Burghart calls overtly racist jargon, including accusations that blacks who receive government assistance “have no souls” and President Obama is “not American.” Global warming is a fraud perpetuated by socialists to obtain control over private enterprise, one workshop asserts, with global warming advocates being compared to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Another hosted by John McManus of the JBS claims that the Federal Reserve system is a Communist front group, and calls for a return to a gold- and silver-based monetary system. McManus also leads workshops that claim American Democrats are colluding with American neoconservatives to build a “one-world government,” a “New World Order” (see September 11, 1990) that would oppress whites and institute “global socialism.” Matt Spaulding of the Heritage Foundation tells listeners that they are the current equivalent of the Revolutionary War-era patriots, and the enemies of America are the “elites” and “progressive liberals” who intend to subvert American democracy. Progressive liberalism, Spaulding says, is an outgrowth of German Nazism. He cites what he calls “Obamacare,” the 2009 health care legislation bitterly opposed by many tea party groups, as an example of the Obama administration’s drive to “socialize” America and undermine constitutional law. At the welcoming ceremony, tea party spokesman Tom Zawistowski, the incoming president of the Ohio Liberty Council, tells the audience that the Obama administration is a “professional army” of socialists intent on overthrowing the Constitution. Zawistowski tells the assemblage that only they, the heirs and successors to American Revolutionary War figures such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, can stop Obama and the “liberal agenda” from destroying America as it currently exists. Vendors sell anti-Obama literature and bumper stickers, along with information on how to purchase weapons engraved with “We the People Convention” and selected phrases from the US Constitution. “[W]e do not hate Obama because he is black,” he says, “we hate him because he is a socialist, fascist, and not American.” While Zawistowski claims that tea parties have no affiliation with Republican politicians, Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots hosts a luncheon where she cautions listeners to avoid voting for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and instead consider voting for another Republican, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN). [We the People Convention, 7/2011; Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 9/16/2011]

The cover of ‘Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?’ [Source: Occidental Dissident (.com)]Conservative commentator and author Pat Buchanan publishes his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? Kirkus Reviews, reviewing an advance copy, wrote before its public release that Buchanan “laments the fading of the Christian religion from American life because he sees it as an indispensable underpinning of our common culture.” Buchanan, the review notes, “fears the nation has abandoned its historic commitment to liberty and equality of opportunity to pursue a chimerical utopia of diversity and equality of result.” Buchanan does not actually predict the dissolution or destruction of America, but predicts “culture wars without end and a continuing self-segregation of Americans by ethnic group.” The review concludes: “Liberals may rightly dismiss this sprawling, often rambling book as nativist claptrap. Readers willing to excuse the nods to predictable right-wing shibboleths and bogeymen will find it a troubling analysis of how America has changed for the worse in the last half century, and how difficult it will be to pull it back from the loss of freedom and prosperity Buchanan sees not far ahead.” [Kirkus Reviews, 9/15/2011]Heavy Criticism for 'Racist' Content' - Jillian Rayfield of the progressive news Web site TPM Muckraker reprints what she calls twelve “pretty racist or just crazy quotes” from the book. One accuses Barack Obama of engaging in a “long and successful campaign to expel Christianity from the public square, diminish its presence in our public life, and reduce its role to that of just another religion.” Many focus on Buchanan’s prediction that white Americans will soon become a minority, and as a result, American culture will collapse. Another accuses black Americans of benefiting from “Jim Crow in reverse,” where whites are systematically and legally disenfranchised and oppressed by minorities. “Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.” Liberal whites, Buchanan writes, “may discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.” The 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act took away key rights from white Americans, Buchanan asserts, instead of mandating equality for all Americans. Only before those laws took effect was America a nation of equality. Buchanan says that his desire to “expel” minorities is not racially motivated, merely an attempt to rescue American civilization and its “European majority.” He says that “49 of 50 muggings in New York City” are perpetrated by blacks. And he says that the Republican Party must become “the white party” if it is to retain its identity, arguing, “[W]hy should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded, built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?” [TPM Muckraker, 10/24/2011] Jeneba Ghatt of the Washington Times accuses Buchanan of repackaging long-disproven stereotypes of non-whites’ genetic and intellectual inferiority. “Anyone can attempt to sell books delivering doomsday-like message based on racist pseudo-Eugenics-based theories as Buchanan,” she writes. “Organizing, galvanizing, and trying to make a colossal effort to effectuate real change is a genuine challenge.” Instead of trying to change society for the better, she writes, Buchanan is “playing that old tired game of scapegoat.” Many Times commenters post scathing rebuttals to Ghatt’s article, citing “scientific” evidence of whites’ and Asians’ intellectual superiority over blacks and Hispanics, with one post calling Ghatt, an African-American, “still a slave” because she advocates equality for blacks. Others attack her given name as un-American and question why the Times would print her material. [Washington Times, 10/23/2011] Janet Shan of The Moderate Voice notes the bluntly racial and racist material in a chapter entitled “The End of White America,” where Buchanan cites statistics showing that within a few generations, whites in America will be a minority, largely because of the increasing number of non-white immigrants and whites being “outbred” by minority citizens. Buchanan focuses strongly on Hispanic-Americans, writing: “Mexico is moving north.… Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to ‘insure domestic tranquility’ and ‘make us a more perfect union’? Or have we imperiled our union?” Shan responds: “In other words, America is heading for disaster since whites won’t be a majority. Really? Only Pat Buchanan could make a black or Latino feel dirty, just because of the color of their skin.” In a later chapter, “Equality vs. Freedom,” Buchanan claims that “the end to segregation and the legislated equality of rights for African Americans” have led to a “socialist utopia” and the collapse of everything he values about American society. Shan writes: “Is he condoning Jim Crow, segregation, and racial injustice in this country? Gee, I can’t seem to remember hearing Pat Buchanan’s name being mentioned in the struggle for racial justice and equality. Every time he is embroiled in controversy it is because of racially motivated comments emanating from his lips on national television. So, I guess, in other words, inequality is just fine for Pat Buchanan and his posse. Just as long as the white right-wing evangelicals are calling the shots.” She concludes: “Pat Buchanan is of the viewpoint that we can never create a nation in which all the races, tribes, cultures, and creeds of Earth are all equal. That utopia can never exist.… We can’t all be equal but that doesn’t mean we lose sight of the Biblical truth of taking care of the least among us. That doesn’t mean we can’t give each child the opportunity to succeed despite the color of his or her skin. I will say, this was a very riveting book and I suspect it will be a New York Times bestseller, but the racial undertones will continue to fan the flames of distrust and hatred for everything Pat Buchanan stands for.” [Janet Shan, 10/14/2011]Conservative Support - At GoodReads (.com), reviewer John Caneday “admire[s]” Buchanan’s “Christian wisdom” as shown in the book, and writes: “He recognizes the spiritual decline in America is responsible for the cultural and political decline we are experiencing now.… He argues that the flood of third world immigration into the Western nations is one of the greatest forces for destruction in the modern world.… Many will charge Buchanan with racism, but the careful reader will realize that Buchanan sees these forces at work in every culture and every nation on earth. Diversity cannot possibly be a source of strength, as everywhere there is diversity, there is conflict.” [John Caneday, 12/15/2011] Free Republic (.com) blogger William L. Houston calls the book “the bluntest and most cogent statement of the truth about the present course of Western civilization that has been seen in American bookstores in many years.… Everything that real conservatives have privately known to be true for generations is finally aired in this brave and long overdue new book.” Buchanan calls the American left “a utopian death cult” bent on destroying America before it destroys itself. “The Baby Boomer elite that was captured by the counterculture in the 1960s has set America on a course to national oblivion: radical multiculturalism, open borders, the welfare state, affirmative action, the obsession with diversity, the embrace of the sick and degenerate ‘free love movement,’ the embrace of abortion and family planning, the embrace of an adversary secular culture that has flatly declared war on Christianity. As a historian, Pat Buchanan is here to remind us of the awful truth that this sort of progressive worldview and the lifestyle that accompanies it has consequences.” Whites are carrying non-white Americans “on [their] back[s]” now, Houston asserts; when “freedom loving European-Christian Americans” become the minority in America in 2042, the economy and the social underpinnings of America will collapse entirely. “Black America is culturally and economically a basket case,” Houston writes. “Hispanic America is worse off in some ways, better in others. White America has gone completely off the rails under the influence of the counterculture. Even Asian America has been negatively affected by the sickness of the dominant culture.” Whites are genetically and environmentally superior, Houston argues, and must continue to steer the nation to ensure its survival. [William L. Houston, 10/31/2011]Praise from White Supremacists - Conservative blogger Hunter Wallace, a neo-Confederate and white supremacist, posts a lengthy, favorable review of the book, saying that it is Buchanan’s “boldest affront yet to the reigning racial and cultural taboos of Black Run Amerika.” Wallace, like Buchanan, focuses much of his attention on American minorities, decrying the fact that “[b]y 2042, White Americans are scheduled to become a minority in the United States.” He continues: “African-American and Hispanic tax consumers are becoming more aggressive and explicitly racial in their agenda. White taxpayers are becoming more defensive. The myth of a ‘post-racial’ society is collapsing. White racial attitudes are hardening again.” Both political parties, according to Buchanan and Wallace, are in danger of being overrun by what they call “officially aggrieved minorities,” especially since white birthrates are declining. America, a fundamentally Christian nation in their view, is also under siege from non-Christian religions and ideologies, and as a result, the “Western culture” that once sustained the nation “has collapsed and nihilism and chaos now reign in the realm of morality. Secular fantasy ideologies like liberalism, humanism, and communism have moved into the vacuum of faith. America is disintegrating as a nation because its people no longer share a common moral tradition. Instead, they bark at each other from across the ‘partisan divide.’ This is the inevitable prelude to our demise as a nation-state.” America’s economic system has become irrevocably corrupted, Buchanan and Wallace assert, by “a confused hybrid” of “liberal capitalist democracy [and] Marxism.” Gay rights, interracial marriage, the American celebration of diversity, and other “corrosive” phenomena, they observe, are heralding the final collapse of American culture, where “the scum of society” is allowed “to punch through the traditional racial, cultural, and religious restraints that have held degeneracy in check for generations and to rise to elite status in the former countries of Western civilization.” Wallace notess Buchanan’s failure to address what he calls “the Jewish question,” but says Buchanan’s decision to do so was “wise” “because 50 percent of American Jewry is scheduled to vacate the earth by 2050.” Wallace concludes, “Buchanan clearly believes that America will be torn apart by ethnonationalism in the 21st century in much the same that Europe was torn about by ethnonationalism in the 20th century,” and says the white, Christian values of “Middle America” are the only ideology that will “save” the nation. [Hunter Wallace, 10/26/2011] Steve Sailer, one of the owners of the white supremacist Web site VDare (.com), lauds Buchanan as a personal friend who “quotes me several times, citing my VDARE.com articles on the ‘racial ratio’—Affirmative Action beneficiaries vs. benefactors i.e. losers—and the real meaning of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores among others.” Sailer praises Buchanan’s “genial honesty” in the book as well as his “bareknuckles” approach to the “truth” of the “decline” of American culture. After spending much of his review lambasting Barack Obama and the American left, Sailer concludes that Buchanan “is now perhaps the wisest, most objective-minded man in American public affairs.” [Steve Sailer, 10/19/2011]

John Birch Society logo. [Source: John Birch Society]John F. McManus, the head of the far-right, anti-Communist John Birch Society (JBS), releases a booklet through the organization entitled “Reality vs. Myth” that attempts to, in the words of the JBS, “set the record straight” about what the organization is and is not. According to McManus, the JBS has never held anti-Semitic or racist views, or tolerated such within its organization. All such assertions come from “enemies” of the organization, often from persons or organizations with Communist affiliations (see March 10, 1961 and 1963), he writes. [John Birch Society, 2011]History of Anti-Communism - The organization was founded in 1958 by candy magnate Robert Welch, a former Massachusetts Republican Party official who began railing about what he considered the “pervasive” influence of Communism in all aspects of American society, particularly in the federal government. Liberals are inherently opposed to freedom and democracy, Welch argued, because liberals are in favor of collectivism/socialism, and therefore are witting or unwitting traitors to the individualist tenets that underlie the US Constitution. The JBS became a vocal opponent of the United Nations, alleging as early as 1959 that the UN intended to establish a “New World Order” (NWO) or “one-world government” (see September 11, 1990). The JBS has also portrayed itself as a fundamentally Christian organization, and views Communism and other non-American forms of government as inherently “godless.” Since the end of World War II, the organization has asserted, the US government has been actively attempting to implement “godless Communism” in place of a Constitutional democracy, including a 1958 claim by Welch that then-President Eisenhower was “a dedicated conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.” Some “Bircher” officials have touted the NWO as being rooted in the alleged Illuminati Freemason conspiracy. In 1964, the JBS enthusiastically supported the presidential candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), though a large number of members supported Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon (R-CA) over Goldwater. The organization opposed John F. Kennedy (D-MA), accusing him of being a traitor and a Communist dupe (see November 1963), accusations it had also leveled against Eisenhower. After Goldwater’s defeat, Welch attempted to land the segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace (D-AL), as a standardbearer for the JBS. [Political Research Associates, 2010] McManus insists that the JBS’s overarching loyalty is to the Christian Bible, the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. ” Our organization was created to uphold the truths in the Declaration and the limitations upon government in the Constitution,” he writes. “Not alone in such an endeavor, we welcome all who treasure what our nation’s Founders produced.” [John Birch Society, 2011]Less Overt Racist, Anti-Semitic Stances - During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the JBS painted the civil rights movement as a Communist conspiracy, accusing “ignorant” and “uneducated” African-Americans of either being witting or unwitting dupes of a Communist conspiracy against America. It launched a powerful and well-organized assault on the civil rights movement, calling it a “fraud” and labeling it the “Negro Revolutionary Movement.” Some JBS publications and officials also asserted that the nation’s financial system was controlled largely by Jews with little if any loyalty to the US, and in some instances actively working to undermine and destabilize America’s economy. Such assertions led many to characterize the JBS as a racist and anti-Semitic organization, characterizations that the organization has always disputed. It has touted its very small number of African-American and Jewish members as proof of its claims not to be institutionally racist or anti-Semitic. In 2010, the liberal Political Research Associates (PRA) wrote: “The JBS… discouraged overt displays of racism, while it promoted policies that had the effect of racist oppression by its opposition to the Civil Rights movement. The degree of political racism expressed by the JBS was not ‘extremist’ but similar to that of many mainstream Republican and Democratic elected officials at the time. This level of mainstream racism should not be dismissed lightly, as it was often crude and sometimes violent, treating Black people in particular as second-class citizens, most of whom had limited intelligence and little ambition. In [one JBS publication], Martin Luther King, Jr. is portrayed as an agent of a massive communist conspiracy to agitate among otherwise happy Negroes to foment revolution, or at least promote demands for more collectivist federal government intrusion.” PRA also went on to note that one of its founders, Revilo P. Oliver, was forced to resign from the JBS after making anti-Semitic and racist comments at a 1996 JBS rally. And, the PRA wrote, “When crude antisemitism was detected in JBS members, their membership was revoked[,]” though the organization still held that anti-American Jews were attempting to do damage to the nation’s economy. “At its core, however, the Birch view of the conspiracy does not reveal it to be controlled or significantly influenced by Jews in general, or a secret group of conniving Jews, nor is their evidence of a hidden agenda within the Society to promote suspicion of Jews. The Society always struggled against what it saw as objectionable forms of prejudice against Jews, but it can still be criticized for having continuously promoted mild antisemitic stereotyping. Nevertheless, the JBS was closer to mainstream stereotyping and bigotry than the naked race hate and genocidal antisemitism of neonazi or KKK groups. In a sense, the Birch society pioneered the encoding of implicit cultural forms of ethnocentric White racism and Christian nationalist antisemitism rather than relying on the White supremacist biological determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right prior to WWII. Throughout its existence, however, the Society has promoted open homophobia and sexism. The Society’s anti-communism and states rights libertarianism was based on sincere principles, but it clearly served as a cover for organizing by segregationists and White supremacists. How much of this was conscious, and how much unconscious, is difficult to determine.” [Political Research Associates, 2010] McManus calls attempts to point out the JBS’s history of implicit racism and anti-Semitism as deliberate, dishonest attempts to “stigmatize” the group, usually by persons and organizations who are working to implement a one-world government and see the JBS as a roadblock to that goal. “There was no evidence that the Society was racist, neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, or subversive of good order,” McManus claims. “But that didn’t stop many from making such charges.… There were some attempts to defend JBS against the flood of vicious characterizations but these were overwhelmed by widespread and undeserved nastiness. No private organization in our nation’s history had ever been treated so unfairly.” He calls efforts to show the JBS as racist “vicious” and false. “If truth were told,” he writes, “the John Birch Society should be congratulated nationally for its important work in diffusing racial animosities.” [John Birch Society, 2011] Many prominent white supremacist leaders used their membership in the JBS to help promote their more overtly racist organizations (see 1970-1974 and 1973). Former Ku Klux Klan leader Johnny Lee Clary has said the JBS “is just a political version of the KKK, without the name of the KKK. They center on the political ideas of the Klan and are not as vocal in public on the ideas of the racial superiority, but they attract the same people and say the same things behind closed doors.… They are racist, and full of hate and are officially listed as a hate group with several civil rights organizations throughout the USA” (see April 13, 2009). Among other non-white leaders, the JBS has labeled South Africa’s Nelson Mandela as a “Communist tyrant” (see December 11, 2009). Reframing Itself - In the late 1970s, the JBS saw its influence waning as more modern organizations comprising what some have called the “New Right” came to the fore. In the 1980s, the JBS lost even more influence after attacking Reagan administration policies. It managed to revive itself by toning down its anti-Communist rhetoric and emphasizing its warnings about the New World Order and positioning itself as a long-time advocate of right-wing, muscularly patriotic popularism. Author and journalist Andrew Reinbach notes that the JBS provided an ideological “seed bank” for many of the tenets currently embraced by the various “tea party” organizations on the right (see February 4-8, 2010 and February 15, 2010), an assertion echoed by conservative journalist Matthew Boyle. [Huffington Post, 9/12/2011; Daily Caller, 11/29/2011] McManus credits the JBS with helping bring about the impeachment of then-President Clinton, stopping the establishment of a free-trade entity in the Western Hemisphere, and putting an end to what it calls “the drive to a sovereignty-compromising North American Union.” McManus says JBS efforts to “educate” the world about the UN has prevented that organization “from becoming the tyrannical world government intended by its founders.” He writes that the JBS successfully thwarted the federal government’s alleged plans to federalize all American law enforcement, and credits the JBS’s black membership with preventing wholesale rioting and insurrection during the Civil Rights Era. He touts the JBS as being one of the primary organizations that blocked the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. And he credits the JBS with being among the first organizations to warn about what it calls the dangers of illegal immigration. He touts the support of, among others, presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX—see 1978-1996 and July 22, 2007) and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan (see June 12, 2009, June 20, 2009, July 16, 2009, and October 18, 2011 and After) as validating the organization’s ideology and positions, and notes that in recent years, the JBS was an official sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference (see April 19, 2010 and February 9-11, 2012). And he claims that attempts to paint tea party organizations as far-right, racist, or homophobic are similar to the efforts by Communists and NWO conspiratists to destroy the Society. He concludes by writing to prospective members: “Don’t allow yourself to be influenced by the false image created by the Society’s enemies. Our country is under attack and The John Birch Society offers a workable plan to combat it.” [John Birch Society, 2011]

Ron Paul (r) removes his mic as CNN reporter Gloria Borger looks on. [Source: CNN / The Blaze]Republican presidential contender Ron Paul (R-TX) again denies any involvement in the racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic content printed in his newsletters for 16 years (see 1978-1996). CNN anchor Sanjay Gupta describes Paul as “kind of prickly” over the accusations of racism in the newsletters, and notes that “his story appears to have changed over the years.” In 1996, Paul admitted writing much of the newsletters’ content, admitted to the positions taken in the newsletters, and called questions about his newsletters “gutter politics” (see May 22 - October 11, 1996). He began denying their content, and his involvement in his newsletters, in 2001 (see October 1, 2001). In 2007 and 2008, he freely admitted supporting the implicitly racist John Birch Society (JBS—see July 22, 2007, August 4, 2008 and December 2011). He denied knowing anything about the newsletters’ objectionable content in 2008 (see January 8-15, 2008 and January 16, 2008) when the questions arose during that year’s presidential contests; Paul supporters accused rival libertarians of smearing Paul’s character (see January 12-15, 2008). In May 2011, Paul was one of five Republican presidential candidates to take part in a debate sponsored in part by the JBS and a racist militia group (see May 5, 2011). Today, Paul walks out of an interview with CNN reporter Gloria Borger rather than continue to answer her questions about his newsletters. He tells Borger that he read the newsletters published under his name “on occasion,” and implies that he was too busy with his medical practice to pay close attention to the newsletters. “You know, I didn’t write them and I don’t endorse those views and I’ve explained it many times,” he tells Borger. “I never read that stuff. I never—I would never—I came—I was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written, and it’s been going on 20 years that people have pestered me about this, and CNN does every single time. So when are you going to wear yourself out?” Paul says even asking about the newsletters is not legitimate, and instead the media should just accept his denials and move on. Borger says such questioning is legitimate because “[t]hese things are pretty incendiary, you know.” Paul retorts, “Because of people like you.” When Borger presses the issue, Paul walks away and refuses to answer further questions. Conservative blogger Erick Erickson of RedState (.com), who is not a Paul supporter, asks Gupta why in 2008 Paul “allowed neo-Nazi Web sites to fundraise for him. We can ask him why three years ago he went on Iranian TV to say that Israelis had set up concentration camps to indiscriminately kill Palestinians.… But I think a more relevant question is, if we can’t go back and ask him these questions from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, why then he—can he go back to the ‘90s and attack [fellow Republican presidential candidates] Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney or Rick Perry for things? They wrote it. Does he believe this is a legitimate double standard?… Ron Paul supporters frequently attacked Barack Obama for sitting in Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church (see January 6-11, 2008) and Barack Obama has denied ever hearing Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. How is Ron Paul’s denial of knowing these things any different from going after Barack Obama for the Reverend Wright matter? There is none. They can’t defend that.” [CNN, 12/21/2011] Note: Erickson is referring to a specific sermon of Wright’s, where he denounced what he called America’s “white arrogance.” Obama did not hear the sermon because he was not in Illinois at the time (see August 1, 2008 and After).

The CPAC 2012 logo. The small print at the bottom reads, ‘A project of the American Conservative Union.’ [Source: CPAC (.org)]The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event, featuring Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney (R-MA), Newt Gingrich (R-GA), and Rick Santorum (R-PA), also features two noted white supremacists, Peter Brimelow and Robert Vandervoort, as headlined participants. Brimelow, the owner of the anti-immigration, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist Web site VDare.com (see November 26, 2004 and May 2008), is part of a panel discussion titled “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity is Weakening the American Identity.” Vandervoort, who writes for the anti-immigrant, white supremacist Web site ProEnglish.com and has ties with the supremacist groups American Renaissance (see July 15, 2002 and September 1995) and the Council of Conservative Citizens (see January 23, 2005, June 2, 2009, and April 16, 2011), speaks on a panel discussion about “High Fences, Wide Gates: States vs. the Feds, the Rule of Law, and American Identity.” Vandervoort also takes part in the “multiculturalism” panel discussion with Brimelow. [Little Green Footballs, 2/8/2012; Newsone, 2/9/2012; Conservative Political Action Conference, 2/9/2012 ] Other Republicans speaking at the conference include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN). CPAC also hosts groups such as the anti-gay Family Research Council and the segregationist Youth for Western Civilization. CPAC denied permission for the gay conservative group GOProud to participate in the event, citing the group’s “behavior and attitude” as its reason for denying access. Michael Keegan, the president of the liberal organization People for the American Way (PFAW), issued a statement calling on Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich to “speak out” against Brimelow and Vandevoort’s participation, and adding, “It’s shocking that the CPAC would provide a platform for someone like Brimelow.” [Right Wing Watch, 2/8/2012] CPAC’s main organizer, the American Conservative Union (ACU), refused to heed calls by Keegan and others to repudiate Brimelow and Vandervoort, instead issuing the following oblique statement through spokeswoman Kristy Campbell: “CPAC is proud to have more than 150 sponsors and exhibitors this year. This panel was not organized by the ACU, and specific questions on the event, content, or speakers should be directed to the sponsoring organization. Cosponsors and affiliated events do not necessarily represent the opinions of the American Conservative Union.” [Buzzfeed, 2/8/2012] Conservative blogger Charles Johnson, who in recent years has regularly protested against what he perceives as the increasing prominence of racism on the American political right, writes: “I admit, this one kind of shocks me, and it’s not easy to do that any more. I knew the right wing had gone bug-eyed loony, but this is way beyond the usual xenophobia and paranoid bigotry; this is open white nationalism at the Republican right’s premier high-profile conference, in an election year. Stunning. Masks are dropping all over Wingnutland.” [Little Green Footballs, 2/8/2012] During the panel on multiculturalism, Brimelow and Vandervoort are joined by Representative Steve King (R-IA) in claiming that America’s “identity” is being “weakened” by its acceptance of minority citizens and their cultural influence. Vandervoort claims that “leftist thugs” have attempted to prevent him from taking part in the event as part of their larger attempt to “shut down freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.” Brimelow calls multiculturalism and bilingualism “diseases” that are infecting American society as they work to empower minorities and “suppress traditional” (i.e. white) citizens. Multiculturalism and bilingualism are, he says, a “ferocious attack on the working class.” King discusses his bill that would make English the official language of the United States. King praises Brimelow, telling him that he has “read your books” and says to the gathered onlookers that Brimelow “eloquently wrote about the balkanization of America.” [Right Wing Watch, 2/9/2012] The 2011 CPAC event welcomed the far-right, implicitly racist John Birch Society as one of its sponsors (see April 19, 2010 and December 2011). That year, some conference participants stated their opposition to having white supremacists taking part in the event, opposition that apparently was not raised this year. And in 2011, Joseph Farah, the publisher of WorldNetDaily, was not part of CPAC because organizers did not want him discussing his questions about President Obama’s citizenship (see May 18, 2009 and March 24, 2011). This year, Farah is allowed to return.” [MaddowBlog, 2/9/2012]

Accused Aurora gunman James Holmes looks on during a recent court hearing regarding his alleged crimes. At some point, Holmes dyed his hair, allegedly to more closely resemble ‘The Joker,’ a villain in the Batman movies. [Source: Reason (.com)]The New American, the official publication of the right-wing John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961, November 1963, April 13, 2009, December 11, 2009, April 26, 2010, and December 2011), promotes a theory from an Internet publication that the recent massacre by a lone gunman in a Colorado movie theater was orchestrated by the Obama administration or its surrogates as a way to impose gun control laws. Writer Bob Adelmann admits the conspiracy theory is merely “conjecture.” The theory comes from the Natural News Network (NNN), which describes itself as a “non-profit collection of public education Web sites.” NNN is incorporated by Truth Publishing International, a Taiwan corporation. The article is titled “Colorado Batman shooting shows obvious signs of being staged,” referencing the film being shown in the theater, The Dark Knight Rises, the third in the “Batman trilogy” by Christopher Nolan. Adelmann introduces the NNN conspiracy theory by reporting that a Forbes magazine article says the US may ratify a United Nations arms treaty that would regulate the international trade in conventional weapons. Adelmann says the UN treaty poses “a formidable threat” to gun ownership in the US. He then introduces the NNN theory as posited by NNN writer Mike Adams. [Forbes, 6/7/2011; New American, 7/23/2012; Samuel Warde, 7/30/2012]Brainwashed Obama Operative? - The shooter, James Eagan Holmes, fired multiple bursts of gunfire in the Aurora, Colorado, theater, but then surrendered to the police without offering any resistance. Adams says his peaceful surrender was inconsistent with Holmes’s apparent desire to “kill everyone.” Adams also finds it curious that Holmes told police his apartment was booby-trapped with explosives. Someone truly wishing to kill many people would not have told police about the bombs. “It doesn’t add up,” Adams says. Holmes’s character as reported by neighbors and friends—quiet, shy, obsessed with video games—does not correlate with the picture of a maddened gunman, he continues. Moreover, Holmes must have had help from somewhere—he was living on unemployment insurance, Adams contends, yet owned thousands of dollars’ worth of weaponry, ammunition, explosives, and SWAT gear. “Where did that come from?” Adams’s answer: Obama administration operatives or someone else doing the administration’s bidding by launching a “false flag” attack. In fact, Adams writes: “There is already conjecture that James Holmes may have been involved in mind-altering neuroscience research and ended up becoming involved at a depth he never anticipated. His actions clearly show a strange detachment from reality, indicating he was not in his right mind. That can only typically be accomplished through drugs, hypnosis, or trauma (and sometimes all three).” Adams continues: “Someone else taught this guy these skills and funded the acquisition of the equipment.… This is somebody who was selected for a mission, given equipment to carry it out, then somehow brainwashed into getting it done. This is not your run-of-the-mill crime of passion. It was a carefully planned, heavily funded, and technically advanced attack.” Adams concludes that Holmes completed his “mission” and then surrendered, “admitting everything” to police. “The mission, as we are now learning, was to cause as much terror and mayhem as possible, then to have that multiplied by the national media at exactly the right time leading up the UN vote next week on a global small arms treaty that could result in gun confiscation across America.” The FBI has carried out “numerous” missions such as this one, Adams contends, though its history until now is to stop the attacks before they reach the point of violence. Adams also compares the Holmes massacre to the “Fast and Furious” operation conducted by Arizona police officers and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF), which has become a popular topic of discussion on the right as another Obama conspiracy theory. Adams concludes: “In other words, this has all the signs of Fast & Furious, Episode II. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover someone in Washington was behind it all. After all, there’s no quicker way to disarm a nation and take total control over the population than to stage violence, blame it on firearms, then call for leaders to ‘do something!’ Such calls inevitably end up resulting in gun confiscation, and it’s never too long after that before government genocide really kicks in like we saw with Hitler (see March 13, 2008 and November 11, 2008), Stalin (see October 13, 2009), Pol Pot (see December 17, 2009 and April 27, 2011), Mao (see January 2009), and other tyrants.” [Natural News Network, 7/20/2012]JBS: Attack's Timing with UN Treaty Signing More than Coincidental - Adelmann admits the theory is “strictly conjectural at this point,” but observes that “the timing of the shootings coinciding with the final details of the UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) being polished up in New York by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” The timing must be more than coincidental, Adelmann writes. According to Adelmann, if the US signs the arms treaty, it would have to abide by strict licensing requirements; confiscate untold numbers of citizen-owned weaponry; ban the trade, sale, and private ownership of all weapons; create an international gun registry (which would, Adelmann warns, open the door “for full-scale gun confiscation”); and finally, “[o]verride our national sovereignty, and in the process, provide license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Ten Amendments in addition to our Second Amendment rights.” The UN treaty would not apply to US citizens, experts note, but Adelmann and others do not believe that assertion. John Bolton, the former UN ambassador and chief political advisor to the Romney presidential campaign, is one of those: he says that while the UN “is trying to act as though this is just a treaty about international arms trade among nation states, but there is no doubt that the real agenda here is domestic firearms control.” Adelmann says the UN treaty is the next step in the Obama administration’s creation of an “authoritarian dictatorship” and ultimate plans for domestic genocide, or what he calls “democide.” He concludes: “That is the nightmare that faces American citizens if in their haste to rid the world of shooters such as Holmes they allow the United Nations to do the job for them. The end result will be immeasurably, horrifyingly, worse.” [Forbes, 6/7/2011; New American, 7/23/2012]More Coverage - Other right-wing outlets also pick up Adams’s conspiracy theory, including Gun Owners of America (GOA), whose president Larry Pratt issues a press release promoting the theory and offering himself for interviews about the theory and about the Obama administration’s purported intent to ban gun ownership in America. [Special Guests, 7/2012; Samuel Warde, 7/30/2012]Treaty Not Passed - The media later reports that the US is refusing to go along with the treaty as it is currently written. [CBS News, 7/30/2012]

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